Posts

A summary of what I have worked on and learnt this month. Maven archetypes For a client project I have created a Maven archetype that is reusable across integrations. It generates a Spring Boot project using Apache Camel, with integration tests set up using WireMock. It also includes the Kubernetes manifests (deployment, mock deployment, etc.) needed to deploy to their dev, test and prod environments. Since most integrations for this department are very similar, a shared archetype saves a lot of time and tedious setup. It also has the benefit of making the projects consistent. I plan on regenerating each existing integration from the archetype and moving the implementation code into the generated project. ...

Someone writes a useful skill, it lives on their machine, and two weeks later a colleague solves the same problem from scratch. That is the pattern most teams fall into. The previous post covered how to write skills for Claude Code: a SKILL.md file that teaches Claude a workflow, living in your home directory where it applies to every project you work on, or committed to a project’s .claude/skills/ directory so everyone who clones the repo gets it too. Both setups work well within their scope. They break down the moment a skill needs to follow someone across projects, or reach a team that doesn’t share one repo. ...

AI coding assistants are powerful out of the box, but they have no memory of how you prefer to work. Every new conversation starts from zero. You explain your conventions, your preferred tech stack, your testing approach, and then you do it all over again next time. Skills attempt to solve this by letting you store reusable instructions that your assistant can draw on automatically. The concept was first introduced by Anthropic for Claude Code and has since been adopted by Google’s Gemini CLI and OpenAI’s Codex. All three follow the Agent Skills open specification, so the principles in this post apply regardless of which tool you use. ...

A common point of failure in infrastructure is the untrusted certificate error that seems to defy logic. These issues are rarely about a single certificate file. They are about a break in the Chain of Trust, the hierarchy that connects your server to a trusted authority. Learning to navigate this hierarchy is the single most effective way to solve the majority of infrastructure-level SSL and TLS failures. Anatomy of a Chain When you run openssl s_client -connect google.com:443 -showcerts, the first thing you see is the Depth List. This provides a map of the entire hierarchy. ...