Now
AI-Assisted Development
Experimenting with GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT for code generation, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) for agentic workflows. Interested in how LLMs change code review practices, documentation generation, and onboarding new engineers. Balancing productivity gains with maintaining code quality and engineering understanding.
Modern Java
Exploring records, sealed classes, pattern matching, virtual threads (Project Loom), structured concurrency. After 20 years of Java, it’s refreshing to see the language evolve toward modern ergonomics without sacrificing backward compatibility.
Developer Experience (DX)
Studying how tooling choices, documentation quality, onboarding processes, and development environment setup affect team velocity and engineer happiness. Small DX improvements compound over time.
Accessibility Beyond Compliance
Moving from “meet WCAG 2.2 requirements” to “design genuinely inclusive experiences.” Learning from disability advocates, testing with real assistive technology users, understanding cognitive load considerations.
Architecture for Legacy Modernization
How to incrementally improve systems built over decades without requiring ground-up rewrites. Strangler fig patterns, feature flagging, A/B testing in government contexts, database refactoring techniques.
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS fundamentals, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), serverless patterns. Current work is primarily on-premises, but understanding cloud-native patterns informs better architecture decisions.
Security at Scale
Advanced topics: threat modeling, security champions programs, supply chain security, secrets management, zero-trust architecture. Moving from “fix vulnerabilities” to “prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced.”