The Setup: Why This Matters Now Six months ago, I made a deliberate choice to run Cursor and GitHub Copilot in parallel across my primary development work. Not as a casual experiment, but as a structured audit. I maintained separate branches, tracked time-to-completion on identical tasks, reviewed the code produced by each tool, and measured …
Author Archives: William Roberts
Salt Typhoon’s Reckoning: How a Year-Long Breach Is Rewriting Federal Network Security Rules
The Breach We Didn’t See Coming, Even Though We Should Have Late 2024 brought news that most of us working in telecom infrastructure had been dreading for years. The FBI and CISA confirmed that Chinese state-sponsored actors had maintained persistent access across at least nine major US carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, for over twelve …
OpenTofu 1.9 vs. Terraform 1.10: The Fork Is Now Real Competition, and Infrastructure Teams Are Being Forced to Choose
The Moment Everything Changed When HashiCorp shifted Terraform to a Business Source License in August 2023, they didn’t just create a licensing dispute. They created the conditions for a genuine fork that infrastructure teams now have to take seriously. I watched this happen in real time across the organizations I work with, and I can …
OpenTofu 1.9: The Terraform Fork That Actually Matters Now
When HashiCorp Changed the Rules August 2023 feels like a long time ago in infrastructure circles, but that’s when HashiCorp made the move that shattered the implicit covenant with its community. The shift from Mozilla Public License 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1 for Terraform wasn’t framed as a restriction at first. Read the announcement …
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Aurora DSQL at Scale: Why AWS’s Quietest Database Announcement Deserves Your Attention
The Database That Arrived Without Fanfare If you were paying close attention at re:Invent 2024, you caught AWS’s announcement of Aurora DSQL. If you weren’t, you’re in good company. This one didn’t get the headline treatment of some flashier launches, which is precisely why it’s worth examining carefully. Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL …
Vibe Coding Is Eating Junior Dev Hiring — And the Consequences Are Starting to Show Up in Production
The Pattern Nobody Wanted to See Coming If you’ve been paying attention to developer communities over the past few months, you’ve probably encountered the term “vibe coding.” It entered the lexicon in early 2025 when Andrej Karpathy’s Original Vibe Coding Post described a specific approach to software development: delegating nearly all code generation to large …
Platform Engineering Is Eating DevOps and Most Teams Are Not Ready for What That Means Organizationally
The Shift Nobody Fully Prepared For If you’ve been paying attention to the industry over the last two years, you’ve noticed something fundamental shifting beneath the surface of how we build and operate software systems. DevOps hasn’t disappeared. It’s being absorbed into something larger and more specialized. Platform engineering has moved from a boutique concern …
Kubernetes 1.32 Finally Fixes Persistent Volume Resizing — And Ops Teams Can Finally Breathe
The Problem That Kept Us All Up at Night If you’ve spent more than a year running stateful workloads on Kubernetes, you know the specific flavor of pain that comes with resizing persistent volumes. The scenario plays out the same way almost every time: your database needs more disk space, or you realize your initial …
The April 2025 CVE Scare: How Vulnerability Disclosure Nearly Broke and Why It’s Still Fragile
The Week Everything Almost Fell Apart In April 2025, the security industry experienced a moment of genuine panic that most of the broader tech world never noticed. MITRE Corporation, the nonprofit that has operated the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures program since its inception in 1999, publicly disclosed that its contract with CISA was set to …
Cursor vs. Windsurf vs. Copilot: After Six Months of Daily Use, Here’s the Brutal Honest Breakdown
The Starting Point: Why This Matters Now Six months ago, I would have told you that Cursor had effectively won the market for AI-assisted coding. The tool arrived early, executed well, and built a loyal following among developers who were tired of context-switching between their editor and ChatGPT. But something shifted in the last half-year. …