About the author
Ken W Alger
@kenwalger
Developer educator and advocate who still ships code. 15 years teaching developers at MongoDB, Heroku, Cisco, and Treehouse. Now writing about AI-assisted development, agent memory, and provenance.
Oregon
Oct 1
Views Measure Views
Nine years in, I finally worked out what else to count. A writer I follow, Sylwia Laskowska,...
Oct 1
The Most Useful Line on Your AI Cost Report Is the One You Can't Explain
Attribution, allocation, and why "unknown" belongs in the schema. This piece grew out of a comment...
Sep 30
A wine cellar that remembers what you used to believe
This is a submission for the Sanity Challenge, Path Two: Vibe-Code Something Strange What I...
Sep 29
Your Metric Is Not Your State
What a refractometer taught me about observability In July, I wrote about a farmer walking a...
Sep 29
Code Review Is Not an Authority Boundary
AI can generate the implementation. Your architecture still has to decide what that implementation is...
Sep 24
I Pulled Nine Years of My Own Dev.to Data. The Numbers Were Not What I Expected.
There is an API. It will tell you things about your writing that the dashboard will not. I have been...
Sep 22
Memory Is a System, Not a Prompt: Putting the Stack to Work
Part 9 of the Building the AI Memory Stack series This series began with a deceptively simple...
Sep 17
Frameworks Are Institutional Memory
I stored passwords in plaintext on a floppy disk in the 1980s. Recently, a coding agent made a...
Sep 15
The Hidden Taxes of Prompt-Only AI
Part 8 of the Building the AI Memory Stack series Over the past seven articles we've built an...
Sep 14
Living a Colorful Life in a Black-and-White ATS World
A career has edges. The schema only stores nodes. I spent years in commercial kitchens and...
Sep 10
The Contract Discovery Bottleneck
AI can generate the code. We can verify the behavior. But who decides what correct means? I wrote...
Sep 10
Why User Provisioning Matters for Enterprise AI
Offboarding a user is not enough when the credentials they leave behind can still spend money and...