Exploring the intersection of learning and technology.
A collection of thoughts, experiments, and deep dives into AI-assisted development, instructional design, and building things that matter.
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Rebuilding My Career Map Metrics with Claude Dashboard
My Learning & Development Career Map has a small button most people never click. It says Tool Metrics, and it opens a panel of counts: map views, role opens, comparisons, lens selections, downloads. It refreshes every 20 seconds and tells me how people actually use the map. It worked, but it read like a receipt. A list of numbers and a few top-five rankings. I wanted to see the activity, not just count it. So I spent part of a Monday morning seeing how far Claude's new dashboard features...
What if Your Daily Work Was Your Certification Exam?
When I worked on certification strategy at Microsoft, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to move past traditional exams to prove someone can actually do the job. Performance-based testing was a big step forward. Instead of answering a multiple-choice question about configuring Azure, we put candidates inside Azure and asked them to do it. Microsoft took this further with Applied Skills, using interactive labs for Azure, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365. You are using real software, but...
Mapping the Modern Learning Profession
A few months ago, I wrote about why I decided to go back to school for a graduate degree in Learning Design and Technology. This came after spending over 25 years working across technical content, customer education, product strategy, platforms, enablement, and a handful of other areas. But sitting right under that decision was a surprisingly basic question: what exactly is it that I do? That question has kind of haunted me for most of my career. Depending on the company, the team, or the...
Bloom’s Taxonomy, AI, and What I’m Actually Learning by Building
Studying Bloom’s taxonomy more deeply in graduate school has me looking differently at how I’ve been spending my time. Over the past several months, I’ve put hundreds of hours into exploring AI-assisted development, building applications, experimenting with different tools, and figuring out why something that looked promising on the first attempt still needed a lot of work. Now, as I pursue my M.S. in Learning Design and Technology at George Mason University, I’m connecting that experience to...
Building Blackjack with AI: Why the Details Matter
I set out to build a blackjack game for fun. Before long, I was thinking about how the cards should land, how the chips should move, and what the table should sound like. I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring AI-assisted development across different projects, and a blackjack table gave me another place to experiment with interaction, visual design, and sound. The result is Luke’s Table, a browser-based game with worn green felt, animated cards, chips you can throw around, and a little...
Why Cheap Experimentation Is the Best Thing About AI-Assisted Development
Over the past several months, I’ve been spending a significant amount of my time deeply exploring AI-assisted development. I’ve put hundreds of hours into projects across very different domains, deliberately experimenting with different tools, workflows, and approaches. Some projects have turned into real products. Others exist mostly because I wanted to understand what was possible. I had a Speak & Spell as a kid and loved how recognizable it became in pop culture, especially after its...
Before You Design Training, Diagnose the Problem
One of the things I've been thinking about since starting my graduate program in Learning Design & Technology is how quickly we tend to jump from a problem to a solution. Someone isn't doing something correctly, a process isn't working, adoption is low, or performance isn't where it needs to be. The natural response is often, "We need training." I've spent much of my career around learning, technical content, certification, product education, and enablement, so this pattern isn't new to me....
Giving Cert Buddy a Direct Line to Microsoft Learn
Early on with Cert Buddy™, I decided the AI features shouldn’t rely entirely on what a language model already knows. That's critical for a certification product. Microsoft technologies change constantly: product names change, capabilities shift, services evolve, and documentation updates daily. A model can be remarkably capable while still working from incomplete or outdated information. So, I connected Cert Buddy to the Microsoft Learn MCP Server. There's also something deeply satisfying...
Speed Trap: Making Practice a Little More Fun
The idea for Speed Trap came to me while I was walking my dog, Jade. I'd been thinking about gamification in Cert Buddy™ and where the line is between making studying more engaging and making it feel gimmicky. Points, streaks, achievements, and leaderboards can all have a place, but I don't want Cert Buddy to turn studying for a certification exam into a carnival of badges and animations. The learning still has to be the point. My mind wandered back to the games I grew up with, particularly...
The Management Book I Still Recommend
I’ve read a lot of books about management over the years. Leadership models, coaching frameworks, organizational theory, difficult conversations, team dynamics. Like most people who’ve spent a long time managing, I’ve probably absorbed dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject. But there’s one book I still recommend more than any other: Managing Humans by Michael Lopp. I first read it sometime around 2007, when I was moving more fully into management roles in software. What I...
Beyond the Question Bank: Building a Learning Engine
Most exam prep tools are essentially question banks attached to a progress bar. When I started building Cert Buddy™, I made a deliberate choice: I wasn't going to build another quiz app or an exam braindump designed simply to help people cram and pass. Putting questions on a screen, scoring answers, and showing a percentage is relatively straightforward. I was more interested in whether an exam prep product could develop an increasingly useful understanding of the learner and use that...
Managing AI Agents Will Become a Core Leadership Skill
For more than two decades, my career has revolved around managing people. I’ve led individual contributors, managers, distributed international teams, technical experts, software engineers, technical writers, and program managers spanning different functions and experience levels. Over time, I learned that effective management is rarely about handing down identical instructions to everyone; it's about understanding what a person needs from you in a specific context. Sometimes that requires...
How I Used AI and User Feedback to Redesign Onboarding in 24 Hours
In a previous post, I wrote about my decision to return to graduate school for Learning Design and Technology and the many roles I have found myself playing while building Cert Buddy™: product manager, learning designer, content developer, UX researcher, business manager, and AI-assisted software builder. The redesign of the app’s onboarding experience is a good example of how those roles overlap. I began with a learning theory and a product assumption, turned them into a working experience,...
Why Now: Pursuing a Graduate Degree in Learning Design
For the past few months, I’ve been thinking deeply about what comes next. I made the intentional decision to step away from Microsoft and take a career sabbatical. After years of moving from one deadline, reorganization, product launch, or business priority to the next, I wanted to create the space to think seriously about what I wanted to do next. That could have meant starting a company, moving into a different field, returning to a familiar kind of leadership role, or pursuing an entirely...
Experiments in Vibe Coding: How I Built a Full-Stack Swimming Pool App Using Replit
I've been maintaining my swimming pool for a few years. While existing pool apps are decent, they usually suffer from the same issues: clunky interfaces, annoying subscription paywalls, or feature bloat. I wanted something lean, specific, and tailored to my exact setup. So, I decided to build my own. To dive deeper into the world of vibe coding (guiding AI to write the code rather than typing every line myself), I put Replit’s AI agent to work. In a single weekend, I went from a rough idea to...
Brew Your Own (BYO) Magazine Exclusive: AI's Impact on Homebrewing
I've been exploring the world of AI-assisted homebrewing and recently shared my journey in an article titled "Artificial or Intelligent?"...
Introducing Homebrewing.ai
As a homebrewing enthusiast with a deep passion for the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI), I am excited to...
An Introduction to AI for Homebrewers
You've probably heard the term "Artificial Intelligence", or "AI" tossed around a lot recently. It might sound like something out of a...
Embracing a Beginner’s Mindset: Lessons from Glen Keane in the Era of AI
As a child of the 70s and 80s, I, like many others, grew up captivated by a host of Disney films. Memorable classics such as The...
10 Ways to Utilize Generative AI in Your Homebrewing Process
As I celebrate my ten-year homebrewing milestone this upcoming Summer, I look back on my journey with fondness. From the early days of...