Topics
What I keep coming back to.
Series run in order; topics are a running theme. Every post also keeps its tags — this is the curated view on top of them.
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Series
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel
Learning Embabel by building with it, in order — planning, testing without a model, tools, human-in-the-loop, tracing, exposing it over MCP.
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Series
Shipping an AI feature into my own product
Build it, attack it, extend it — the Ask Zakaria concierge from first prompt through prompt-injection red-teaming to matching a job description.
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Series
Learning MongoDB
Coming to document databases from a relational background, in order — modelling, then aggregation, then what the engine does underneath.
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Topic
Traces, Tempo and the LGTM stack
Instrument it, learn to query it, then point it at something that thinks.
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Topic
Working with Claude Code
An agent as a collaborator rather than an autocomplete — design systems, durable knowledge, automation ladders, subagent fleets on my own source, and now in CI.
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Topic
Security and privacy, in practice
Secrets delivery, response headers, a cookie banner that sets no cookies — and what happens when you attack your own features.
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Topic
The Model Context Protocol, hands on
Building MCP servers and pointing agents at real systems — Spring Boot tools, an email inbox, a JVM agent framework.
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Topic
Spring and Java mechanics
Framework behaviour that only shows up when you push on it — validation, migrations, batch, and aggregate boundaries.
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Topic
Running the box: Docker, Linux, the JVM
What actually happens between systemd and your fat jar.
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Topic
Building this site in public
Shipping and operating my own product in public — one jar serving two hosts, making it findable, dropping experiments into it, shipping a free CV builder off the side.