The Pentagon Just Hit Ctrl-Z on CMMC Phase II

The Pentagon just hit Ctrl-Z on CMMC Phase II. Meanwhile, nation-state APTs are still ./scanning your supply chain. The defence supply chain has always had a soft underbelly. Thousands of small contractors stitched together with hope and unpatched servers, hanging off primes who’d rather not think about what’s downstream. CMMC was the right idea born from the right instinct. The execution left something to be desired. Good Intentions, Bad Implementation CMMC tried to harden the DIB’s seams. Flawed from the start: ...

July 14, 2026 · 3 min · Nick Schmidt

No Mario on the C64: How Platform Lock-In Forged My Open Source Soul

When I was a kid in Sicily, my mom and I would bike across the flight line at Comiso AB so I could play Frogger on a Commodore 64 at the BX. That C64 became the genesis of everything for me: games, programming, running a school newspaper, and eventually discovering BBSes. But there was one thing I wanted desperately and could never have. Mario. Yes, the original Mario Bros. (the one with the pipes and turtles) did exist on the C64. I knew that. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted Super Mario Bros. The NES version. The one scrolling across the TV in every commercial, every magazine, and every other kid’s living room. ...

July 12, 2026 · 3 min · Nick Schmidt (oneguynick)

The 20-Year Tech Debt: Why Burning Junior Talent is a Strategic Defeat

BLUF: If we keep burning junior talent today, we will have nobody to inherit tomorrow. The industry’s loss of patience with entry-level devs is creating a 20-year problem we are refusing to see. The Vanishing Entry Level Had a good conversation with fellow geeks Fernando Covatti and Dávid Kőszeghy about AI and junior programmers as we think about talent. Everybody is losing patience with juniors. Fair enough; they need hand-holding, they make mistakes, and they cost time. But here is the question nobody is answering: what happens in 20 years when the current senior engineers are retired? I think about this because I lived a version of it. ...

July 8, 2026 · 3 min · Nick Schmidt (oneguynick)

The New Fuel for the Field is Electrons

Mobile power generation in the field. BLUF: The new fuel for the field is electrons, not diesel. Having spent my career building military and ISR systems, I know firsthand that power generation is a massive bottleneck. Diesel is a logistical vulnerability—fuel convoys are targets, and traditional generators ruin noise discipline while lighting up thermal sensors. The Army developing the ISV-Heavy as a roving 60-kWh power station is a necessary shift in operational architecture. ...

June 29, 2026 · 2 min · Nick Schmidt (oneguynick)

The Strategic Imperative of Edge Generation

Spain’s new mandate requiring telecom operators to maintain 4 hours of backup battery power at their transmission masts is a major victory for clean distributed energy assets at the edge of the grid. My buddy Jesse Gary was well ahead of the curve on this. Long before the current energy transition, he wasn’t advocating for deploying new diesel gensets, but rather utilising our existing ones as a strategic lever to supercharge investments into the clean energy space. His core argument remains absolute: any generation at the edge has usefulness, and by extracting maximum value from legacy infrastructure, we can fund and accelerate the transition to cleaner replacement assets like batteries. ...

June 28, 2026 · 2 min · Nick Schmidt (oneguynick)