Building My First Claude Skill
The journey of building a custom Claude skill that transformed vague AI suggestions into specific, actionable business decisions.
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Year-End Clarity: How Notion Became My System of Record
Every December, I step back and ask what actually stuck this year. What worked. What didn’t. This year, I realized something simple: my system of record is Notion, and it only works because everything is connected. I didn’t build this from scratch. I took inspiration from Ali Abdaal’s productivity work, August Bradley’s Notion Life Design
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Using Claude to Migrate to a Newer Version of Node
I recently upgraded an AWS Lambda function from Node.js 18 to Node.js 24. It was a straightforward migration on paper, but like most upgrades that touch deployment pipelines, there were enough gotchas to warrant some careful planning. Claude’s planning mode turned out to be really useful here. Not just for generating the plan, but for
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Vibe Coding: My Early Field Notes
I’ve been spending more time with vibe coding lately. These new AI-assisted IDEs seem less like code editors and more like creative partners. It’s wild how quickly this space is evolving. We’re not just “writing code” anymore. We’re managing conversations, personalities, and workflows that actually feel different. Claude Code has become my go-to for standalone
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When is an AI Gateway overkill?
Whenever a shiny new product drops — like Vercel’s AI Gateway (InfoQ article here) or the already-established OpenRouter — it’s tempting to think “I should add this to my stack right now.” But here’s the truth: whether you need these tools or not depends heavily on where you are in your AI journey. Early Stage:
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When Windsurf went off the rails (and how pattern guidelines saved the day)
Back in March, I was in full chaos mode with Windsurf on a codebase that had somewhere around five thousand lines of code spread across multiple services. The AI was doing exactly what I told it to do, which sounds good until you realize what I was actually telling it to do made no sense
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What Just Happened at Snowflake Summit 2025?
AI is Here, and It’s Deeply Embedded in Your Data Stack Snowflake Summit 2025 just wrapped, and the message couldn’t be clearer: AI isn’t just a feature—it’s now part of the foundation. This year’s event unveiled a bold vision for what they’re calling the AI Data Cloud. Here are the top takeaways worth knowing, especially
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Understanding Snowflake’s Standard Roles (And When to Use Each One)
If you’re managing access in Snowflake and want to keep things clean, secure, and easy to reason about, it helps to understand what the built-in roles are actually for. Here’s a breakdown of the standard roles Snowflake provides, what they can do, and how I typically see them used in practice. ACCOUNTADMIN The most powerful
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Headless Snowflake Auth with Okta? Use Key Pair Authentication Instead.
I recently had to load data into Snowflake from a headless EC2 Linux 2023 instance. Easy, right? Until you realize that your org uses Okta SSO and SnowSQL’s go-to option is –authenticator externalbrowser. Great—except there’s no browser on this box. After trying a few dead ends (including looking for a magical –output oauth flag that
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A Personal Dive into AI IDEs
Being a long-distance running coach is one of my passion projects, and I love how it gives me the chance to keep learning and improving—both for my athletes and for myself. What makes it even more exciting is when I get to combine it with my constant curiosity for the latest advancements in technology. My
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