Hi, I’m Jacques. This is where I write about development, AI, homelab tinkering, and whatever else I’ve been into — technical or not.
From Prompts to Autonomous Systems: Practical Agent Workflows in Daily Engineering
Most engineers begin their interaction with large language models inside an open chat window. You type a prompt into an interface, paste an excerpt of code, wait for a stream of generated tokens, copy the suggested fix back into your editor, and run your compiler to see if the changes function. For small utility scripts or localized function refactoring, this manual conversational cycle feels like an acceleration. Once your requirements expand to multi-file refactoring, systemic codebase migrations, or end-to-end bug investigations, conversational chat interfaces collapse under their own architectural weight. The user becomes a manual data conduit, perpetually copying terminal outputs and compiler stack traces back into a text box. More critically, the chat session accumulates hundreds of turns of discarded attempts, stale hypotheses, and rambling conversational pleasantries that dilute the model’s attention.
Your Firewall's Management Console Belongs Off the Public Internet: Lessons from the September KEV Surge
Between 21 and 25 September 2026, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) expanded its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue with a barrage of high-severity flaws across critical edge and enterprise infrastructure. The list reads like a core inventory of enterprise IT deployments: Check Point Management Server and Security Gateways, Microsoft on-premises SharePoint, F5 BIG-IP, Citrix NetScaler, and MikroTik RouterOS. In multiple instances, weaponized exploitation preceded vendor patches, leaving internet-exposed administrative interfaces vulnerable to unauthenticated remote execution.
Stop Clicking Through Fourteen Menus: Why PowerShell Is the Turning Point for IT Support
At 8:15 AM on a Monday, a helpdesk technician faces a wall of fourteen fresh tickets. The accounting department print spooler has stopped responding. Four remote laptops crawl at a snail’s pace after weekend cumulative updates. An executive account is locked out, and human resources submitted a spreadsheet containing five new hires who need user accounts, cloud security groups, and mailbox access before their 9:00 AM orientation. Resolving that queue through graphical interfaces requires opening remote desktop sessions across slow network tunnels. It demands clicking through services.msc, navigating Task Manager menus, manually verifying event viewer logs, and copy-pasting employee names across administrative browser portals. Each ticket consumes eight to ten minutes of repetitive pointer motion. By the time the morning queue clears, half the workday has disappeared into routine mechanical clicking.
Why I Rebuilt My Personal Site with Hugo and Semantic CSS in 2026
For nearly two years, my personal website was built on modern front-end machinery. It ran on Next.js with the App Router, React 19, Tailwind CSS, PostCSS, and Nodemailer server actions. On paper, this was an industry-standard stack. It gave me server-side rendering, API routes, automated code-splitting, and a familiar developer experience borrowed from large-scale client engagements. In practice, it was an absurd architectural mismatch. A personal website is primarily a publication engine for long-form technical prose, project documentation, and structured career history. It does not handle high-frequency transactional data. It does not require real-time WebSocket connections or multi-tenant database synchronization. Yet every time I wanted to publish a short essay or adjust a typography token, I was spinning up a heavyweight JavaScript toolchain, pulling down hundreds of megabytes of dependencies, and troubleshooting runtime hydration quirks.
Why I Wrote a Book on Prompt Engineering (And Why 'Prompting' Is the Wrong Word)
I have spent the last two years watching engineers argue with autocomplete. They type a question into an LLM, get a wrong answer, and conclude the model “doesn’t understand” the problem. Then they rephrase the same question three more times, hoping the fourth attempt triggers some hidden reasoning circuit. It never does, because there is no reasoning circuit to trigger. There is a statistical engine predicting the next token, and the gap between what people think it does and what it actually does is where every bad prompt comes from.
A Bug Hunter's Lens on Web Application Hardening
Corporate cybersecurity advice often fixates on compliance matrices, annual penetration test reports, and automated dependency scanners. Engineering teams spend days triaging medium-severity alerts for outdated utility libraries while missing the fundamental structural flaws sitting in plain sight inside their own application logic. During offensive security assessments and bug bounty research, automated scanners rarely discover the vulnerabilities that matter. The most devastating findings almost never involve exotic zero-day memory exploits or deep cryptographic breaks.
The 9U Silent Homelab: Raspberry Pi 5, Docker, and a Dead 8TB Drive
The typical homelab showcase on Reddit or YouTube often resembles an enterprise server closet. Enthusiasts rack decommissioned Dell PowerEdge towers, run dual redundant 10-gigabit fiber switches, and proudly display 42U cabinets that draw 800 watts at idle while heating an entire basement. That aesthetic is impressive, but it represents a specific hobbyist obsession. For my daily requirements, computing infrastructure should remain quiet, draw minimal electrical power, and perform its designated tasks without demanding a second full-time job in systems administration.
Why Willpower Fails: Building a Zero-Memory Financial Engine for ADHD Brains
The Executive Function Trap: Why “Set a Reminder” Doesn’t Work for ADHD Brains Every piece of standard bill-paying advice assumes the same thing: that on the day the reminder fires, you will have enough working memory, enough task-initiation energy, and enough tolerance for a boring administrative task to actually act on it. Set a calendar alarm. Use a budgeting app. Just open the envelope when it arrives. None of that is a system. It’s a request for continuous executive function, delivered on a schedule that has no idea what your week actually looks like. CHADD’s overview of executive function skills lists the relevant ones by name: working memory, task initiation, sustained attention, self-monitoring. Paying a bill on time uses all four, back to back, with no room for one of them to be having a bad day.
From Code to Google Play: Shipping MicroQuote as a Solo Developer
Earlier this month, production release versionCode 8 of MicroQuote went live on the Google Play Store . The part that actually surprised me wasn’t the TypeScript, the SQLite schema, or the PDF layout. It was that finding 12 people willing to install an unfinished app and actually use it for two straight weeks turned out to be harder than writing the offline sync logic. The Problem: Quoting Software Wasn’t Built for the Job Site Most software built for small business quoting assumes an idealized environment: high-speed fiber, a desktop monitor, and enough time to sit down with accounting software.