All of my long-form thoughts on programming, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
Owl Food Support: a TypeScript foodbank agent on Twilio Agent Connect that works over voice and WhatsApp, remembers household details in Conversation Memory traits, runs an eligibility check, books a real collection slot, hands messy cases to a human queue, and ships with prompt evals that check it keeps its promises.
A production story from a WhatsApp course delivery platform: why an autoscaling platform and a per-instance connection pool are a trap, how the failure showed up, and the changes that fixed it for good.
Lessons from building a RAG assistant over a founders knowledge base at Acumen Academy: a tree-based retrieval structure driven by Contentful metadata, a keyword layer that answers lookups without touching a model, and a pre-warmed cache for the documents everyone asks about.
I wrote a tutorial for the Twilio blog on building a WhatsApp fact-checking bot. The tutorial answers every message with a fresh LLM call. The real bot does not, and this post explains the three-tier pipeline that keeps it fast and affordable.
Every year just before Christmas, this tweet warning about holiday deployments resurfaces within Engineering circles. It is testament to the complications that could arise when we deploy changes to code. For this reason many companies have made the shift to Test Driven Development (TDD).
iCal, short for iCalendar, is an internet standard file format used to store calendar information. Being a standard format, it is compatible with most online calendars, giving you access to important dates regardless of your preferred client (Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc.).
Natural Language Processing (NLP), is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. With the help of Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which is a branch of NLP, computers are able to handle the nuances of language.