Hidden limits masquerading first as a database problem and then a serialization problem
A tool call kept arriving with null arguments. The fix had nothing to do with the code that was failing.
I’ve been writing computer software for 44 years, most of it professionally, and it’s been a long, fun path to get where I am. I began learning to program at age 11 on an Apple ][+ back in 1982. I used to ride my bicycle twice a week halfway across the tiny town we lived in to visit the library, which had a computer available to the public. I would often stay there from opening until the librarian would shoo me out 30 minutes before closing time.
At 19 I enlisted in the Marine Corps, learned COBOL, and did mainframe programming for the next few years.
- Spent my first year in Okinawa, Japan building software with dBase III+ and FoxPro
- Spent the rest of my enlistment in Kansas City, Missouri building and maintaining VSAM table software with COBOL/CICS
After my enlistment, I returned to New Orleans and earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
It took me a few years to complete as I was also:
- An electrician in the Louisiana Air National Guard
- A Natural (ADABAS) programmer working Y2K bug-fixes at the Stennis Space Center
- Working the parts counter at a local motorcycle shop
- Maintaining COBOL/CICS code in the wire department of a local bank
After completing my degree:
- I began working as a Java application developer at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) for a few years
- Moved to Baton Rouge and began work on a web portal for students to submit TOPS Scholarship applications for the Louisiana Department of Education
- Moved to Virginia to work on the Military OneSource program for ValueOptions
- Moved down to Georgia to raise my children close to my extended family while continuing to work for ValueOptions.
By the time I finished my degree, programming had gone from something I biked across town to do for fun, to something I’d been formally trained in, and finally to something I could do for others and support myself at the same time - 31 years and counting on that last part. Lots of life happened in the meantime. I almost finished my Master’s degree, but a medical emergency interrupted, and I’ve not yet been able to restart it.
Since my work on Military One Source ended earlier this year, I’ve earned my AWS Certified Developer certification and started volunteering some of my time for a small nonprofit - building them a new web presence to share their activities, news, and video content, with email built in. It’s a dockerized, AWS-native application running on Redis, PostgreSQL, S3, SES, and Elastic Beanstalk, and it’s been a genuinely useful way to get real, hands-on experience with modern cloud-native patterns I didn’t get much exposure to in 14 years on a legacy federal stack. It isn’t live yet - I’ll link to it here once it is.
Most recently, I’ve been building an autonomous AI research agent using Spring AI and Claude that handles the agent lifecycle from document ingestion and vector search through a custom guardrail system to keep the agent’s tool use bounded and reliable. It’s been a useful way to get hands-on with the parts of modern backend engineering — containerization, vector databases, agentic AI design.