Articles
Engineering notes from production.
Long-form writing grounded in code that ships — Apache Cassandra, JHipster blueprints, AI semantic search, and the systems behind Saathratri.
-
What Running a Family Business Taught Me About Software Engineering
I have spent twenty-four years writing software and most of my life around a family business — my father's factory in Nairobi, a dot-com startup that taught me an if-statement is hard to sell, and now hotels and gas stations in South Florida. The lessons run in one direction more than people expect: the family business keeps teaching the engineer.
-
Conscious Parenting for Engineers: Debugging Yourself First
I spent my career in the deterministic world of software — and then I became a father and discovered children are not deterministic systems. How an engineer forged on defense programs came to conscious parenting through Dr. Shefali's and Sue DeCaro's work, earned the Conscious Parenting Method certification, and learned that the only code you can refactor is your own.
-
How a Small Independent Hotel Can Actually Use AI (Without a Big Budget)
Practical AI for independent hotels from someone who owns the hotels and writes the code: AI guest chat and QR-code room landing pages that deflect front-desk calls, AI-drafted review responses, back-office automation, and AI visibility — showing up when travelers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity where to stay. No enterprise platform contract required.
-
Automating a Family Business: The Back Office That Runs While You Sleep
How a family hospitality and fuel business automated its back-office and front-desk operations, including accounting: overnight statement retrieval and filing, preventative-maintenance reminders that land where the family already looks, and the rules for picking what to automate first — patterns over tools, from the engineer-owner who built and operates them.
-
Adding an MCP Server to a Spring Boot Platform: Lessons from Production
How to add a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to a Spring Boot platform with Spring AI — and what production actually demands beyond the starter: multi-tenant tool design, guardrails and rate limits on write tools, tool-description token budgets, transport and service discovery, and knowing what to keep out of the server. Based on the 30-tool MCP server running inside the Saathratri platform.
-
Adding AI Semantic Search to a JHipster App with pgvector and OpenAI Embeddings
Yes, there is a JHipster blueprint for pgvector: generator-jhipster-ai-postgresql adds AI semantic search to generated apps — auto-embedding on create and update, HNSW indexes, cosine-similarity filtering, Liquibase vector(N) migrations, and a search bar in the Angular UI — all from a JDL annotation. This guide shows how it works and what it generates.
-
Paginating Apache Cassandra the Right Way: Paging State, Not Page Numbers
Offset and page-number pagination are anti-patterns on Apache Cassandra. This guide shows the correct approach — cursor-based Slice pagination with Spring Data's CassandraPageRequest and paging-state tokens — with production code generated by the open-source generator-jhipster-cassandra blueprint.