Jon Simpson - Engineering Modern Systems

I recently upgraded my Pixel phone and went through the long process of signing in to all my apps and making sure all the data was moved over from the old phone.

The other week, I had a great time talking with a classroom of grade 4 and 5 students about my work as a software developer, how I got into the field, and what it’s like to work with AI.

On several of my side projects I’ve found a great pattern for using agents to autonomously test out new ideas, measure their impact, and track that knowledge for future iterations. run-experiments is a repeatable skill for an agent to iterate on an experi…

One day at our monthly team offsite, I witnessed the wildest demo I’ve ever seen.

Git worktrees have existed for a while now.

I love keeping up with tech news, especially nowadays with AI and agentic everything moving so fast.

When it comes to planning out a new feature (aka. developing the spec), there are a lot of great techniques and advice out there.

Beads is a real game-changer for me.

I’m having an absolute blast playing the game of figuring out how to utilize coding agents to speed up software development at work and in my personal time.

While at a wedding a few months ago, I met this mutual friend who’s a year or two younger than me.

I was listening to my weekly Security Now podcast that was referencing an old security issue from 2009.

As I turn thirty one, I’m in Montreal, a place I’ve been several times over the past decade for both work and play, but all amazing times.

My partner and I got a dog!

Looking back at the past couple of years of homeownership, it’s crazy thinking of how much stuff I’ve done myself.

Recently, a buddy and I had the opportunity to help fix the WiFi at a couple of local bars, both part of a larger chain.

I’ve just passed my one‑year anniversary at Mantle.

At Mantle, we’re growing our team, including engineers!

It’s that time of year again, and this time it’s marking my thirtieth birthday.

One of my first projects I worked on at Mantle was building an integration with HubSpot.

One of my recent projects was to improve my Plex media streaming experience by figuring out how to install a consumer graphics card into the Dell server I built a few years ago.

As a manager, one of our key responsibilities is guiding the growth and development of your team members.

My 28th year has been a great one.

October 1st just passed yesterday.

Throughout 2020 I have listened to hundreds if not now thousands of hours worth of podcasts.

I recently had my laptop running Xubuntu 19.10 reach its end of life for security updates.

ZFS is quite a feature rich filesystem.

This is a second post in a series of my experiences while Building a Homelab.

2020 is the year I turn 26.

This is the first post in a series of my experiences while Building a Homelab.

Over some vacation I put a bunch of effort into rebuilding my dotfiles and other environment configuration using home-manger, Nix, and the wealth of packages available in Nixpkgs.

When a project is created for changing out an existing dependency with another one, there are many factors that should be thought of.

Here’s a continuation of the previous post covering day 1, this one instead on the talks I attended for Day 2 of RubyConf 2019!

I attended RubyConf this year in Nashville, Tennessee with a few of my teammates from Shopify.

My friends half-jokingly call it my quarter-century birthday.

Building software can be hard.

Today I was pair programming with a member of my team on a new GraphQL mutation.

For businesses to outperform their competitors and bring ideas to the market fast, Software Development has evolved towards a continuous delivery model of shipping small, incremental improvements to software.

One of the primary projects which has defined the existence of my team at Shopify was a complete rebuild of the Help Centre’s platform.

One of the more powerful tools on my toolbelt is a red-green development cycle.

Writing tests for some code which generated HTML ended up surfacing one peculiarity with how HTML encodes URLs.

It’s hard to come up with the content for this post while fending off a sickness, but I know it’s a yearly ceremony for myself to look back and reflect on the prior year.

I was working on building a content management engine for Shopify’s next generation Help Centre.

My team and I are exploring different services and technologies in the area of contact centres.

With the release of Rails 5.2 and the changes with how secrets are securely stored, I thought it would be timely to write about the benefits and downsides of secrets management in Rails.

My team and I are building a GraphQL service that wraps multiple RESTful JSON services.

When they say you’ll like learning and programming in Ruby, they really mean it.

The 2017 BSides Security Conference, just outside of Ottawa, was a two day event from October 5th to 6th.

I’m Twenty-Three dude!

100% Derpy It’s a pain to get the latest version of the Go programming language installed on a Debian or Ubuntu system.

A while ago I was looking into what it takes to setup a private Docker Registry.