Essays and notes from Jose Lopez. Building software, running systems, and what the work actually teaches.
Grieving the Craft
AI puts professionals through all five stages of grief, and everybody grieves differently. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and the sixth stage David Kessler added: meaning. When the rote work falls away, what is left is the work that mattered most.
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Stay or Migrate? FileMaker and AI
Claris shipped FileMaker 2026 with AI annotations, DR add-ons, and agentic coding previews. Here is what the release actually means for whether you upgrade again or migrate to a modern stack.
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The Loop
On the education loop, parallel rebuilds, and what 15 years of building software actually teaches you. The sunk cost argument stops making sense when starting over costs a weekend instead of a quarter.
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