Development on Gordon Burgett | Director of Software Engineering, Albers Aerospace

Pushing Claude Code Further with Spec Driven Development

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

The Problem I’m Trying to Solve

I’ve been coding with AI agents for as long as they’ve been generally available, and I keep running into the same bottleneck: me. Every time Claude generates code, I need to review it. Every time it completes a feature, I need to verify it actually works. Every time it runs tests, I need to check if the failures are real bugs or hallucinations. I’m the human in the loop, and I’m slowing everything down.

Building Alice, an Empowering AI Agent

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

What does it look like to build AI agents that actually empower people’s lives, not just “augment” them? For HealthShare Technology Solutions, I wanted to build an AI agent that non-technical users can actually use to take the hassle out of their health care cost sharing plan. In this post I’ll describe the guiding principles and design decisions that made Alice not just possible, but empowering to everyday users.

The guiding principles I used in building Alice come down to four key words:

Building an Unstructured Data Import

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 10:00:00 -0500

Sometimes the hardest thing to figure out is not “how” to best apply a new technology, but “when not” to apply it. Nowhere has this been more true than with AI. With the rush to stick the AI brand on every project, software engineers are being pressured to “just throw more AI” at the problem and hope it works.

In my hourly contracting on Neighbor Solutions, I’ve been asked to build a data import pipeline for community resources. To give a bit of context, one core function of the Neighbor Solutions app is to help users who have a heart for our unhoused neighbors to guide them towards helpful resources in their community. These can be food banks, shelters, warming stations, and many more. The major technical difficulty here is getting accurate data into the system in an automated way. Many times, lists of these resources are in poorly formatted PDFs or screenshots of webpages. There is very little consistency here, so some amount of natural language processing is required.

Implementing Licensing & Permissions in a React Redux app

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 10:00:00 -0500

In the process of building out the VoirDire App for our client, we ran into an interesting problem. How do we enforce licensing requirements in a cross-cutting way, without tediously identifying every area in the UI where the user might take an action that they were not allowed to take? The client’s licensing requirements were:

On the free plan, a user can have 1 trial, up to 20 jurors, and up to 20 stored questions.
With a standard license ($30), up to trials, 100 jurors, and 100 stored questions.
An unlimited license ($50) removes all limitations.

Since we are using Redux to handle application state, calculating the remaining jurors, trials, etc. in the license can be done with a selector. The selector accepts the entire redux state and the user’s current license key, then calculates whether they are over or under the limit.

Thoughts on Cursor

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 10:00:00 -0500

As AI tools continue to reshape software development, I’ve been particularly impressed with Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that has transformed my daily workflow. After several months of use, I want to share my experiences and observations about why this tool has become indispensable in my development process.

The most striking impact of Cursor has been the dramatic increase in my productivity - I estimate it has doubled my coding speed. The secret sauce that Cursor has nailed is the UX around applying suggested edits back to my codebase. The experience feels natural, almost like dictating your thoughts to a junior developer who then implements the code exactly as you envision it.

Feeling Like I'm at Hogwarts

Sun, 20 May 2018 14:52:15 -0500

I spent some time this week playing with Typescript 2.8’s new features for modeling various complex types. The new syntax that I wanted to play with was the conditional type syntax,

`1`	`T extends U ? X : Y`

This syntax allows you to express some really crazy type relationships! Some of the most interesting ones have been pre-defined in the Typescript standard lib:

Exclude<T, U> – Exclude from T those types that are assignable to U.
Extract<T, U> – Extract from T those types that are assignable to U.

I wanted to see if I could use these to model the way we’ve been working with return values from Contentful’s Content Delivery API.

Making a static site searchable

Sun, 23 Jul 2017 17:28:52 +0200

My site is getting pretty big now! 50+ posts, plus my journal entries from years past, I have content stretching over 4 years. So I started thinking about ways to add search functionality. And anyone who knows me knows I like to make these kind of things more complicated than they need to be, so with that in mind I had a fun challenge to solve. How do I add search functionality to a static site?

Modern Static Sites

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 13:49:22 +0200

Today in 2017, there are a thousand and one different ways to build a website. As always there’s good old fashioned Wordpress, and of course there’s drag-n-drop website builders like Wix. One thing these have in common is that they need a traditional hosting environment, and for that you gotta pay.

If you can manage it, the cheapest way to host a website nowadays is to create a static HTML site. But don’t hand-craft HTML, that’s hard and boring. Use a static site generator, for fun and profit!

Taking Control of My Data

Sat, 17 Sep 2016 15:33:34 +0200

One of my projects during my vacation has been to take back control of my data. The question of online privacy is a difficult one, because while there’s some things you can do to improve your privacy, to really own your data takes a lot of effort and learning. For most people, hosting their own services is more headache than it’s worth. There’s a lot of good privacy-conscious services out there if you’re willing to pay, but most people are not willing to pay. The convenience trumps the privacy concerns, and for me it has been that way for a long time as well.

Adventures in Dockerland

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 20:33:52 +0100

I’ve been on a serious docker/aws kick recently. I’ve learned just enough that it drives me to play with it. I spent a lot of my free time on it this week, and didn’t spend as much as I’d like on learning Albanian… This could be a problem…

Anyways I might as well post more about what I’ve learned. I’ve been wanting to make my web server more robust, to where if it dies for whatever reason I don’t have to do anything, it’ll come back on a new instance all on its own. Unfortunately that’s a bit more difficult than you’d expect. Lots of moving parts.

Docker Cloud is Neat

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 14:09:13 +0100

I had some time off today so I decided to revisit how I’m hosting all my stuff. One of my issues with using Amazon’s container service is that they make you assign resource values to each container, and those are not flexible. So, I have to give each container high enough memory that it won’t die, but then I run out of space on my server real quick. Since most of the stuff I want to host just sits idle the majority of the time, this wasn’t ideal for me.

Hosting Reclaimed

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 21:31:01 +0100

Here’s another technical post for y’all!

I had some time this past weekend, so I took a look into the website I made a year ago for Reclaimed. The old version was made with Locomotive CMS, and hosted on Locomotive hosting. It was a good choice at the time, because we needed something fast. We wanted to deploy it before the 2015 super bowl.

I’d previously looked into moving it to Wordpress or Drupal, but that would basically require redoing the whole site. More work than I’m willing to put in. But, just this past weekend, Locomotive v3 came out. I decided to try hosting it myself, because $20/mo is just a bit too much to be paying for a simple website like this. Plus, it would be fun! (or so I thought.)

Running with Docker

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 20:33:41 +0200

Locked out!

I managed to lock myself out of my EC2 instance when I was managing my keys. So in order to update my blog, I had to deploy it to a new EC2 instance. I decided to take the opportunity to improve the way I’m deploying new versions of my site.

Note: This will be a technical post. If you’re following along with my adventure in Albania, you can skip this one.

Migrating to Node

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 23:23:19 -0500

My experience migrating my blog to nodejs

which which?

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 22:49:08 +0100

I’m using locomotivecms for a project I’m working on, and it uses ImageMagick for resizing pictures on the fly. The standard instructions say to use the bitnami Ruby stack installer to get everything you need in a nice neat bundle.

That worked for me for a while, until I needed to update the version of ruby I’m using. So, I went through the long and painful process of uninstalling the ruby stack, installing each component individually, identifying and correcting a ton of minor problems, and finally squashed the last bug by writing this program.

hosting the blog

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 18:42:21 -0600

I decided to use Amazon EC2 to host the blog, because they give you 1 year free on a micro instance. Plus I’ve always wanted to learn how to host something on Amazon’s cloud. I’ll get a linux instance and put an Apache HTTP server on it. Should be easy enough to do.

Here’s my EC2 management console after signing up for an Amazon account and creating a linux micro instance: ![EC2 Management console](/images/2014/EC2 management console.png)

Creating a blog

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 13:52:12 -0600

Well, here it is.

I’ve been wanting to create a blog for a while. I don’t know what it will look like in the future, or how often I’ll update it, but as I sit here writing it it’s kind of cathartic. It would be good to get some thoughts out there, and if anybody reads it that’s a bonus.

I want to talk about anything and everything on this blog. I’ll delve into my work, hopefully some of these pages will be useful when another developer types some obscure error code into google. I’ll discuss my faith, hopefully that could spark some interesting discussion. I’ll discuss the important stuff that happens in my life, hopefully someone might find it interesting.