Matthew van Bird

Notes from Matthew van Bird - staff engineer writing on .NET, AWS, distributed systems, and pragmatic AI engineering.

Writing

Snowplow + Snowflake: The Stack Is Fine, The People Are The Problem - 2026-05-24
Pick Your Poison: NuGet's Quiet Wrong Versions vs npm's Loud Supply Chain - 2026-03-22
Writing Skills for AI Coding Tools (And Why Most Shouldn't Exist) - 2026-02-18
How AI Made Us Productive and Clueless: A 2025 Retrospective - 2026-01-01
Why You Should Avoid Using Exceptions for Normal Application Flow in C# - 2025-05-10
The good, the bad and the ugly of Vibe Programming with Cursor - 2025-04-21
The Hidden Cost of \"Free\" Open Source: Overengineering, Licensing Risks, and When Simplicity Wins - 2025-04-08
The Full-Stack Illusion - 2025-03-03
Infinite References and Their Elegance - 2025-02-22
Head vs Heart Engineering - 2025-02-08
The Corporate Conundrum: Why Employees Tolerate Inferior Tools, Processes and Systems - 2025-01-03