Insights & Writing

Writing on AI engineering, software development, and technical leadership. I publish on Medium and maintain a blog.

Featured Writing

Selected recent articles on AI engineering, tooling, and technical leadership.

Building a Multi-Agent Assignment Planner with CrewAI

I learn best by building something real, so when I needed a way to keep on top of degree assignments alongside full-time work, I used it as a problem to test CrewAI against. This article walks through building a hierarchical multi-agent crew (Researcher, Analyst, Advisor, and Manager agents), iterating across four baselines including Pydantic structured outputs, prompt and schema alignment, and a comparison between GPT-4o-mini and Ollama local models.

How to Get the Best Out of Your AI Code Assistant

Practical strategies for getting consistent, high-quality results from AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, based on a year of daily use in real-world projects. Learn how to structure prompts, apply the 'human test,' and use advanced techniques like chain-of-thought, few-shot prompting, and role assignment. Includes actionable tips for teams, code quality, and integrating AI into your development workflow.

A Year on the Shadow Board

When I first joined Version 1’s Shadow Board, I didn’t fully appreciate how transformative the year would be. I knew it would be an opportunity to get involved, share ideas, and learn from senior leaders, but I didn’t expect the experience to shape my confidence, broaden my network, and show me what “learning by doing” really looks like. One of the pieces of advice we received at the very beginning was: “You get out what you put in.” This couldn’t be more true. This article is a reflection on my year, what I learned, what surprised me, where things didn’t go to plan, and why I’d encourage anyone to say yes to opportunities like this.

My Experience Using Windsurf Editor: The Pros, Cons & Learning Curve

A hands-on review of Windsurf Editor used during a client project involving Angular and .NET. Evaluates the pros, cons and learning curve of AI-assisted development, comparing Windsurf with GitHub Copilot across real tasks.

Earlier Writing & Career Journey

I keep my earlier writing here deliberately. It documents the journey from the classroom to production systems, and I hope it shows others that it's possible to start again and build a new career in tech.

Blog Posts

Posts from Teacher Turns Turtle, covering my learning journey and experiments in tech.

PDF Resources

Reference guides and certification materials.