About
Why the blog is called “Lazy Engineer”
There’s a slightly boastful story behind the name. I got tired of opening and reading the same news emails at the same time every day, so I ended up building a pipeline that pulls the articles out of Gmail, summarizes them with AI, drops them into a spreadsheet, publishes them to the blog, and even sends the email for me. It’s not just the news summaries: I automate repetitive research and report work whenever I can and take my hands off it. I wonder if anyone has ever worked this hard just to get lazy.
What I do
By day I manage a technical sales team at a company that sells software development tools. My original strength is software design for embedded systems, C in particular. I also work with Python, Docker, Git, requirements management, software testing, static analysis, and dynamic testing, helping customers think through their development processes and tool adoption.
What I’m into lately
Right now I’m most interested in how to use AI agents in real work and in personal automation. I’m also keeping an eye on Model-Based Design (MBD) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).
What I’ve been writing
Lately I prefer long series that follow one problem I wrestled with for days over short tips. Rather than writing up only the tidy conclusion, I leave in where I got lost and what I got wrong along the way.
What I’m building: Gemini Butler
The project I’m putting the most effort into is obsidian-gemini-butler, a personal knowledge assistant plugin for Obsidian. Following Andrej Karpathy’s “LLM Wiki” idea, it uses an LLM (currently the OpenAI API) to automatically summarize and organize scattered notes and meeting minutes. For now I’m only using it in my own vault and polishing it, but I plan to open-source it someday.
Open source
When I hit a bug or something annoying, I’d rather fix it and send a PR than just file an issue. For AstroPaper, the theme this blog runs on, I sent fixes for a bug that broke Markdown table alignment and one where the previous/next post links pointed the wrong way. I’ve also sent a few fixes for things I ran into in projects like hermes-agent, honcho, and honcho-self-hosted.
What this blog is for
I write about programming, books I’ve read, and what I’ve run into and learned while leading a team. The main purpose of this blog is to record and share all the trial and error along the way, and how I got past it. I can’t promise a regular schedule, but in my head I’ve resolved to post once a week. Then again, with a name like Lazy Engineer, I can’t guarantee how well that resolution will hold up.
Contact
You can reach me through the GitHub icon at the bottom of this page, or by email at contact [at] decipher99 [dot] com.