Fifteen years of personal and professional software engineering across several different corporate domains, while growing my own code garden in the moonlight hours. HowardSoftware is where I build for the life around the code: some products small and personalized for my own utility and fun, others for large corporate domains such as finance, healthcare, payment transaction systems and much more. All built with a mindset of personal and professional growth, real and open.
Numbers I can stand behind, notes I write as I go, and the rules I build by.
Personal and professional software engineering across finance, healthcare and payment systems, and a code garden of my own.
Evidence-backed write-ups. Every lesson has a source line under it.
Exam objectives practiced on real work, tracked in a practice ledger.
I stopped building tools around the agent and started using what the vendor ships. Most of what went wrong this month came from not stating the cost, or the done-check, before starting.
Oct 17, after rebuilding the lab on official features
howardsoftware.net: one home for the software suite, an about page and a way to say hello.
Only launched products live here. Each card has the same anatomy: a framed screen, a name, one line, the stack, and a Visit link.
A data-driven Diablo II: Resurrected wiki: items, runewords, sets, skills and monsters, built and maintained with AI agents.
Home of the Slime Soccer Beta: a modern reimagining of the early-2000s classic, with Beta sign-up.
More software is growing. Each project joins the suite when it launches, and retired ones stay here with the lessons they taught.
Case studies are the technical record: what broke, what fixed it, and the source behind every lesson. Essays are the human record, and they come second for now.
Closed every open decision for taking howardsoftware.net live in one build session, and finished the pre-flight: accounts, DNS, mail, secrets, hosting and the repo.
Lesson: A pre-flight ends with commands that prove the toolchain, not with a list of accounts.
Finished the review where I approve the copy and pick the visual assets, then tried a rebuild driven by the asset picks and went back to the approved design.
Lesson: When a design is already approved, rebuild on it and treat later review answers as content.
Retired a homegrown agent orchestrator and rebuilt the setup on official features: CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks and subagents. Less code to maintain, fewer surprises at 2 a.m.
Lesson: Use the vendor feature before writing the wrapper.
Ran the built-in diagnostic first and let it list the stale settings, instead of writing a cleanup script and hoping it was right.
Lesson: Diagnose with the tool that ships, then delete.
Pointed every session at a repository, so each one starts from committed configuration rather than whatever the machine remembers.
Lesson: If it is not in the repo, it does not exist.
Followed a usage spike back to long sessions doing many jobs at once. The fix was a habit: one task per session, the cheapest model that does the job.
Lesson: Cost is a design constraint, measured in trends.
My best architecture decisions arrive about twenty minutes into a walk. I used to feel guilty about that. Now I put the walk in the plan.
Writing a rulebook an agent could follow forced me to say out loud what I actually believe about done, about failure, and about rest.
A product that does one thing well lets me close the laptop at six. That is a feature, and I design for it.
The agent can write the first draft in minutes. Reading it like it matters is still my job, and it is the part I want to keep.
Questions about a product, a role, or something you're building. I read every message myself.
Get in touch