Steve

HILL

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Building Four Emulators Without Writing a Line of Rust

I needed emulators that could script input and capture screenshots on demand. Nothing on the market did that. So I built four of them with AI — in a language I don't know — guided by decades of knowing what correct looks like.

The IC Choice

After twenty years, people assume you either moved into management or failed to. There's a third option: you chose not to, because that's not where you have the most impact.

Building Quizzie: A Real-Time Quiz App in Boring Technology

I needed a quiz app for corporate training. Three npm packages, vanilla JavaScript, and a polling fallback later, it works everywhere - including networks that block modern web features.

Shipping Three Projects (and What Opus 4.5 Made Possible)

An assembly education platform, an iOS card game, and an artillery game I've been trying to build since the early 2000s. Claude finally got them over the line.

Building for the Failures You Can't Control

Early in my career, I built ticketing systems for arts venues. Our platform could be bulletproof - but if the client's backend fell over, the on-sale still failed. That taught me how to build resilience around dependencies I couldn't control.

Six Years After Warning About Microservices

In 2020, I wrote a theoretical warning about microservices. Then I spent three years inside 120 of them. Here's what the theory didn't prepare me for.

Sustainable Software, Revisited

In 2023, I wrote about sustainable software development. I focused on engineering practices. I should have focused on whether the business underneath could survive.