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The USAF’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft recent updates got me thinking about AI in software engineering. I spent my Air Force career securing information systems. Not flying them. But after decades in aviation, the Loyal Wingman concept hits different when you are building software. Grew up a military brat near air bases, hearing afterburners crack overhead. I joined the Air Force for information security, not the flight line. Closest I got to the cockpit was securing the systems behind it. Working in aviation most of my adult life makes the Loyal Wingman analogy for AI less of a stretch and more of lived experience. ...

I bought a Nordic Track treadmill back in 2024. What I expected was exercise equipment. What I got was a $2,000 Android tablet bolted to a motorised belt, running a walled garden so restrictive you couldn’t sideload a calculator without corporate permission. Six months in, the deck snapped under normal use. Warranty claim processed, no hassle—they replaced it with the newer 2026 model. I thought I was getting an upgrade. Turns out I was getting stricter DRM, more aggressive update checks, and an even more locked-down console. ...

When I started out, I told anyone who’d listen that cloud storage was trivial. “How hard could it be? Just rsync the diffs and call it a day.” Here’s what I didn’t understand: Dropbox isn’t rsync. It’s a distributed consensus algorithm wrapped in delta encoding, layered atop conflict resolution heuristics, with background sync threads that don’t die when your laptop sleeps, and version history that survives accidental deletions, ransomware, and the inevitable “oops I deleted my entire directory” moments. ...

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: ...

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. ...