Tech

This is part 4 of the Agent production system series. Previous: Docker homelab ops. Constellation: the whole agent production map — especially Orchestrator, Eval gates, and Human approval. I am a former Senior Technical Program Manager at Xbox/Microsoft. That sentence is past-tense on purpose — and it still explains how I design agent systems. People hear “TPM” and picture a calendar full of status meetings. At its best, platform TPM work is the opposite of that caricature: critical path, risk, multi-team alignment, and SLA performance under real blast radius. Someone has to know what is actually on the path to “done,” what can kill the ship window, which teams are blocked on which contract, and when a green dashboard is lying. That is the job. ...

This is part 3 of the Agent production system series. Previous: Human approval. Constellation nodes: Docker host, Azure / ADO, Dashboards. Agents need somewhere to live. Chat UIs hide that fact. Production does not. I operate a Dockerized homelab with 20+ production containers split across two physical hosts — a Mac Mini M4 running the compute-heavy services under OrbStack, and a Synology NAS handling bulk storage, VPN-gated download automation, and the public-facing reverse proxy. That number is on the About page for a reason: it is a real ops footprint, not a laptop demo. ...

This is part 2 of the Agent production system series. Previous: Eval gates are not optional theater. Constellation node: Human approval. People hear “agent fleet” and picture a fully lights-out factory. That is not what I run — and not what I want. I run a system where agents move the bulk of the work and a human still owns irreversible decisions. The merge button (and its cousins: force-push, secrets, prod infra, public claims) is not a relic. It is a designed control. ...

This is part 1 of the Agent production system series. Start with the system map if you haven’t read it yet. On the interactive diagram: Eval gates. Demo agents look smart until they touch a real repo. In a demo, the agent writes the code, the code runs once, everyone claps. Nobody checks what happens the second time, or the tenth, or the time the agent decides the fastest way past a failing test is to delete the test. Then you learn the hard lesson: intelligence without a gate is just a faster way to ship a bad change. ...

Most “AI agent” demos stop at a chat box. What I care about is the opposite: a production system with routing, tools, gates, hosts, and a human who still owns irreversible decisions. This post is the written version of the interactive map on my About page — how the fleet is wired, what each layer is for, and what I refuse to automate. The mental model Think factory floor, not chatbot: ...

It’s been about six years since the last post here — heads-down at Xbox/Microsoft will do that to a blog. I’m picking this back up. Expect more content soon, mostly around AI and agentic workflows, the models behind them, engineering best practices, and video games — the same mix of tech and games this site has always been about, just with a few years of new things to say. Thanks for sticking around. More soon.

Welcome to my blog! This is the first post on my newly rebuilt Hugo site. I’m excited to share my thoughts, projects, and insights here. This site is powered by Hugo and deployed to GitHub Pages, making it fast, static, and easy to maintain. More posts coming soon!

My Tech Evangelist colleagues, Joe Raio and Brian Sherwin, have create a great set of video tutorials on how to create your own website using Azure. This is part of Microsoft’s Choose to Code campaign, which guides your middle and high school students through a series of online tutorials walking them through the process of creating and publishing their own website. If you are using Azure Passes, watch this video If you are using DreamSpark, start with this video Course Setup and Azure Activation Building your very first web page with HTML using Visual Studio Online! Let’s learn how to add some style to your page with CSS Make your website mobile friendly using Bootstrap Making your website interactive using JavaScript Learn how to use jQuery to send and receive data Still need Azure? Reach out to me to inquire about BizSpark

If you find some links that you think would be useful, feel free to share! You can always subscribe (or unsubscribe) by clicking on the MailChimp widget on the right-hand side of this page. Here’s a link to the original file. Gaming The Flame In The Flood – Adventure game on Kickstarter Here’s Why We Need Video Games In Every Classroom “How Long To Beat” -> useful site that tells you how long it takes to beat a game Game Dev Reverse engineering Yoda Stories VC / Startups The unexpected and uneven evolution of the startup fundraising market What is the definition of a seed round or an A round? A Couple Of Good Books For Entrepreneurs Seed Round Pricing (Actual data warning!) The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon 25 Angel Investors in New York You Need to Know From board games to beer-making machines: Take a look at the Seattle startup scene Nerdy / Tech 100 Technical Things Non-Technical People Can Learn To Make Their Lives Easier HTML5 PhoneGap Day US 2014, in San Francisco Apache Cordova 4 released

RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. Power point slides Video Walkthrough Get this working on Windows Phone In part 2 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Insert Let’s test this out by running the project from Visual Studi and inserting a new object into our leaderboard. Deploy the sample, connect to the Azure service, then insert a new username and score. ...