John C. Waters, Platform Team Lead. Platform engineering, Azure infrastructure, and AI agent tooling in C#, Python, and TypeScript.https://www.johncwaters.com/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/128kb-of-ram-made-better-games/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/128kb-of-ram-made-better-games/The best games came from people who couldn't do the obvious thing. The wall is gone, and now a limit only holds if something besides willpower enforces it.Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/how-developers-work-with-agents-or-dont/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/how-developers-work-with-agents-or-dont/I scored 411 firsthand accounts of developers running AI agents. Most use a bare terminal and still read the diff. The ones with their own tooling stopped.Sun, 08 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/my-terminal-congratulated-me-for-clearing-the-screen/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/my-terminal-congratulated-me-for-clearing-the-screen/My agent dashboard said a session finished when I'd only cleared the scrollback. Three war stories from making Claude Code's signals tell the truth.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/self-healing-email-parser/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/self-healing-email-parser/When an unknown email format shows up, call an LLM once to write a reusable extraction profile, then parse that format deterministically forever.Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/the-403-that-refused-to-be-a-one-line-fix/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/the-403-that-refused-to-be-a-one-line-fix/A failing deploy, a hand-edited Azure role shared by three services, and why the fix was an IAM-as-code layer with a drift gate, not a permissions patch.Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/waffle-fries-are-the-worst-fry/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/waffle-fries-are-the-worst-fry/Waffle fries are the worst fry, and Five Guys fries are awful no matter how many land in the bag. Thirteen shapes and thirteen chains, ranked.Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/we-audited-24-readmes-then-deleted-the-process/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/we-audited-24-readmes-then-deleted-the-process/Twenty pull requests into a manual documentation cleanup, we abandoned the epic on purpose and replaced it with a linter and a required CI check.Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.johncwaters.com/blog/what-context-actually-buys-a-coding-agent/https://www.johncwaters.com/blog/what-context-actually-buys-a-coding-agent/296 scored trials of a headless coding agent on real tasks, across four context regimes and two models, plus the bugs I found in my own harness.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT