About

I write about engineering judgment at the staff-and-leadership boundary — hiring, RAG in production, and the decisions that don't show up in commit messages.

I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Global Shop Solutions, where I work on an ERP platform that's been shipping since before I was born. Before that I was at Guideline, a Rails-heavy fintech, and SCI. Eight years in, the through-line is the same one: TDD where it matters, opinions where they're earned, and a low tolerance for hand-waving in technical discussions.

The blog is mostly three things:

• Hiring and team judgment — what I look for, what I cut, the questions I actually ask
• RAG and LLM systems in production — the parts that aren't in the demo
• Legacy systems and rewrites — making the business case, surviving the migration, knowing what to keep

Outside of work I'm a husband and father of two boys. I run lawn equipment more than is strictly necessary, drink at local breweries, and spend summer weekends on the boat. None of that ends up in the blog, but it explains why most of these posts go up after the kids are asleep.

Find me on GitHub or reach me at brennan [at] hitchcock [dot] dev.