Ben Piper

I recently went through an interview process that didn't feel like an interrogation. It felt like a high-level strategy session.

I got to dig into how my past as a network and systems engineer informs how I build cloud infrastructure today, why I've embraced AI agents as a force multiplier, and how I approach system …

Automation was the promise. Ever since the industrial revolution, the goal it seemed was to have machines do all human menial labor to free us up to do, well, other stuff. Automation meant we got everything we needed faster and cheaper, and that we'd never lack or suffer scarcity.

With the advent of the information …

The secret to seamlessly integrating AI into almost any workflow isn't a secret at all. In fact, it's so fundamental and obvious that people overlook it. There seems to be a tendency to think that because AI is new and different, that we must use it differently than other tools. But that's not the case. AI is …

Something isn't adding up. Companies are having massive layoffs, yet there are a huge number of job listings that never get filled. Meanwhile, qualified people are applying to these jobs in droves, but few are getting hired. Why?

There's one likely explanation that fits: many of these jobs don't exist yet. The term for …

AI/ML is only half of the future. The other half is, well, old fashioned programming. What everyone is going to eventually figure out is that for many problems, AI can provide only half-baked solutions that are better solved by explicit rules—in other words, loops and conditionals. If you're serious about using AI …

A concerning pattern is playing out with AI in enterprise: people rush to bolt AI onto existing tools and flawed workflows, and the result is faster, messier failure.

AI is not the process, and it can't always overcome a bad one. AI amplifies what you give it. If the underlying process is broken or undefined, …

To be clear, in my experience, most managers are not going to fall into the category of "bad boss." In fact, in my entire career, I have had only one truly awful manager, and that was nearly 20 years ago. For some reason, bad managers don't seem to stick around long in the tech world, which is good news for …

Sorting and Filtering Data

One of the most common tasks performed on the command line is sorting data. This can be done using the sort command, which is part of the GNU Core Utilities package. Sorting is useful when you need to arrange a list of items in a specific order, such as alphabetically or numerically.

Here's …