Zero to Hoodie
19K+ subscribers
EVERYTHING you need to go from ZERO to HOODIE and Start your Cybersecurity Career in 90 Days!
Category
Tech & Code
Software engineering, security, data science and machine learning. 7 publications, newest posts first.
Publications
Data Science & Machine Learning 101
4K+ subscribers
By Data Professionals, for Data Professionals. This is your centralized Website that has all of your data professional needs: We cover: - Money Making Guides -…
Software Architecture with BowTiedCelt
1K+ subscribers
What is the difference between junior devs and sr+ engineers? Software architecture and systems design skills. Learn those here on my substack to accelerate…
BowTied Fullstack
Hundreds of subscribers
Tactics that will grow your tech career with juicier job offers & faster promotions. And occasional in-depth reporting on Canada's economy, politics, real…
The Bit Shift
Hundreds of subscribers
Cutting your work hours in half. Productivity, Software, and latest AI trends.
Explaining technical concepts easily understood over a cup of coffee
Info and help with getting hired and succeeding in DevOps/SRE in tech. No BS. No sponsors. Take the skills you have, showcase them, crush the interview, get…
Latest in Tech & Code
The Death of Prompt Engineering
In 2023, “prompt engineer” briefly looked like it might become a real profession. Anthropic advertised a Prompt Engineer and Librarian role paying between $175,000 and $335,000 per year . The job involved figuring out the best…
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Local AI: Today’s Cloud Outage Is Your Wake-up Call
Today for over an hour, every major cloud AI provider went offline. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI Grok, Google Gemini, Cursor. Engineering teams worldwide were paralyzed, shaking. They did nothing for hours. But, do you know what didn’t…
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The Tech Career You Can’t Go To School For
Part 1 was me telling the story of how I went from dead-end job to successful DevOps career by accident. Read it if you haven’t already. Now let’s talk about how, in 2026, to get there starting from scratch. First off: you’re…
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How to Get Fired
A few years ago, my wife showed me a video of some personal finance guru explaining that you should never quit your job, but you should always get fired. This was because especially when you work anywhere for a long time, you…
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AI Inference
Once an AI workflow works, the next problem is usually making it fast and cheap enough to use regularly. That, is an inference problem . Inference is the process of using a trained model to produce an output. Every time you send…
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The Tech Career You Can't Go To School For
It was the late 2000s and I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree and was working in a nondescript, dead-end office job. I was making a modest living—enough to pay rent but not much else—in a mid-sized city nowhere near a tech hub,…
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Why SRE/DevOps Is the Best-Kept Secret in Tech Careers
There's a tech career paying $200–400k at the top, with no degree, no bootcamp, no academic pipeline at all—and almost nobody applies for it, because almost nobody outside of the industry knows it exists. This, in a word, is…
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Synthetic Data for your workplace LLM
Most teams working with LLMs eventually run into the same problem, they know what they want the model to do, but they do not have enough examples of it. Maybe you want an internal AI assistant to classify support tickets, write…
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Dataset Engineering for Workplace LLMs
A generic model such as GPT or Claude already knows how to write, summarize, classify, reason, and generate code. What it does not know is how your organization wants those tasks performed. It does not automatically know your…
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Building The Solo Software Empire
Mythical Factory Man The previous article around Building A Solo Software Empire described a theoretical state: make a software business legible in repositories, markdown, scripts, infrastructure code, and runbooks, then let a…
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AI Roundup: Grok-4.5, the Summer Surprise Model Drop
Grok-4.5 is the summer surprise model drop of the season. After slowly falling behind from being a competitive frontier lab, the now amalgamated SpaceXAI Grok-4.5 model has got people talking. It effectively offers Opus-4.8 /…
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How to adapt a General LLM to Your Role
A general purpose AI model can know a great deal about finance, law, programming, accounting, and business. Unfortunately, it still knows almost nothing about how your specific organization works. It does not know your internal…
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AI Roundup: Hermes Agent
I’m about 3 months into using Hermes as my primary agent. For the first 4 weeks, it was mostly as a split test against the incumbent next-gen agent harness: OpenClaw . At the time, Hermes had not yet hit hockey stick growth. It…
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AI Agent Failure Modes & Memory
AI agents are exciting because they promise more than a single response. A good agent can plan, use tools, gather information, execute actions, reflect on results, and keep moving toward a goal. That is what makes agents…
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AI Agents
AI agents are one of the most talked-about ideas in modern AI, and for good reason. If chatbots gave people their first glimpse of what LLMs can do, agents are what made many people start imagining truly autonomous software. An…
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Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAGs)
Foundation models are powerful, but they still make a very human kind of mistake that is: “they answer confidently when they do not have enough information.” Aka, what we call “Hallucination” That is the core problem RAG solves.…
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(Un)make your own (un)luck
The next AI Roundup is almost ready to publish but first, a brief interlude on the most unlucky man I’ve ever worked with. Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project. Focus on growing the business, never worry about the…
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Defensive Prompt Engineering
Once an AI application is public, it is no longer interacting only with well-behaved users. It is interacting with curious users, careless users, malicious users, hostile webpages, poisoned emails, weird documents, and tool…
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AI Roundup: OpenClaw
While perhaps the most polarizing and popular of the AI cults to date, OpenClaw has become the first breakthrough for the next generation of AI harness. Don’t ask Garry where he wants to stick his gstack Source And after a few…
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Startups: how to join the "Big" Fish in the Little Pond
Moving from big tech to a startup is a shock to the senses in many domains. In the most literal sense, you are jumping to a small pond from a big one, you can often be moving from a company with thousands of engineers to one that…
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How a Solo Developer Can Build a Software Empire
For the first time a solo developer does not need a big team, a custom platform group, or months of internal tooling work to build a serious software delivery system. You can bootstrap your own self hosted platform now. Not…
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Best practices for prompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the fastest way to improve an AI application. That is why everyone starts there. You do not need to retrain a model. You do not need new GPUs. You do not need to touch the model’s weights at all. You just…
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AI Roundup: Amp Code & Conductor
It’s been a few months since the last AI Roundup, but today I’m dropping the latest case study on the latest AI tools I’ve been using that have unlocked incredible productivity (and not exclusively for my boss). Past posts have…
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AI Newsletter For CEOs - 3/13/2026
Editors Note: I’ve been experimenting with OpenClaw (paid article soon) to perform Cron Jobs. One of those scheduled jobs I wanted was a summary and synthesis of the a variety AI news since AI is moving at light speed and it’s…
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Get Hired: Closing the Offer
Picking up on a recent Interview On-Site Day deep dive , today covers the applied negotiating tactics you need to close the deal. Let’s dive in. Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project. Focus on growing the business,…
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AI as a Judge
One of the weirdest ideas in modern AI is this: “You can use AI to evaluate AI” At a first glance, that sounds bizarro, maybe even a little stupid. If the model is already unreliable sometimes, why would you trust another model…
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Perplexity is not your KPI
Perplexity going down usually feels like you are making progress…and during pretraining, it usually is. But there’s a hidden gotcha here, you can make a model better for users (more helpful, more instruction-following, more…
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How to Get Your W2 Colleagues Fired
Today, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to celebrate, and give the back story on a recent win, you may have seen on X . Eventually, you reach a point in your career where you can afford to fuck around. Maybe, you…
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Get Hired: Mastering the On-Site Interview Day
It took a few weeks but you finally made it. From the first recruiter’s message on LinkedIn, to booking that technical screen, then another. And now, you’ve arrived. The on-site interview day. In person. Full day. Here’s what to…
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Nuclear Meltdown: How AI Maximalism is Destroying Companies
“Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger Enterprise companies the world over are shoving AI down the throats of both employees and customers. New chatbots & 1990s Microsoft Clippy AI helpers are…
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Powering Up Your Agentic Coding Levels
“There’s levels to this” - Meek Mill That’s my current belief of Agentic Coding right now. For every new person still painstakingly working in IDEs instructing their Agent one file at a time, there are people who have entire…
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Getting Started with Agentic Coding with OpenAI's Codex
If you have wanted to start agentic coding and don’t know where to start, this is the place for you. There are so many coding agents now that it’s confusing where to start and what offers you the best capabilities. As we speak…
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Lessons from the Homelab
Homelabs are a continuous journey with frequent waypoints and rarely have a final stopping point. This is my main takeaway from the last year of building out my own personal cloud setup at home. What is time consuming, annoying,…
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Framework Computers are Mainstream
Since the launch of the M series of Apple Silicon Apple has held an immense advantage on portable laptops due to the integrated structure of their system on a chip — Apple Silicon. It combines CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, along with System…
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Running AI Locally With Llama.cpp
If you need even more performance out of your Local AI then we need to shift to more powerful AI backends to run our models. More tokens per second means we can get answers faster and iterate sooner, letting us develop our…
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The 2024 Bit Shift Review
2024 saw the launch of my paid Substack, giving you advice on Productivity, AI, and Programming. If you read any of these articles you are already ahead of your peers who still work on tiny desks, 1 screen, and don’t know what…
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