There’s a persistent bias in engineering culture toward novelty. AI agents, distributed systems, real-time pipelines. But some of the most impactful work in my portfolio is boring automation.
The Email Template Engine
Building HTML emails is painful. The Email Template Engine replaced a 20-minute manual copy-paste workflow with a CLI command that takes seconds. YAML in, branded HTML out, CSS automatically inlined for email client compatibility. No ML, no cloud services, no complexity budget.
Keep Sync
Keep Sync converts Google Keep exports to structured Obsidian markdown. Auto-categorization, dedup, backlinks. Packaged as a .exe so non-technical users can run it. The hardest engineering problem was making it simple enough that someone’s first interaction with it just works.
Choose boring technology until the constraints force you to choose otherwise.
Innovation Tokens
Dan McKinley’s concept of “innovation tokens” remains one of the most practical heuristics in system design. Every team — and every personal project portfolio — has a limited budget for new technology. NightShiftCrew spends its innovation tokens on the AI agent pipeline. Everything else should be as boring as possible.
The hidden cost of new technology isn’t learning it — it’s debugging it when it fails in ways nobody has documented yet. The theoretical foundation for this argument is in The Case for Boring Technology. And the same principle applies to how we work with AI itself — the most productive sessions are the most constrained ones, as I explore in On Finite Tokens and Infinite Tasks.
Related
Projects: Email Template Engine · Keep Sync · NightShiftCrew v2 · Workflow Automation Framework · Job Apply Assistant
Writing: The Case for Boring Technology · On Architecture as a Design Discipline · On Finite Tokens and Infinite Tasks
