Beyond
the Tutorial

Essays and field notes on software, from the middle of the thing.

I'm Ed Mays. I write about the parts of building software that don't fit in a tutorial — the decisions, the tradeoffs, the afternoon you spent debugging a thing that turned out to be one character. Some posts are code-heavy deep dives. Others are essays on taste, craft, and why this keeps being hard.

Recent

• AI Didn't Build My App. I Built It by Knowing When AI Was Wrong. Apr 19, 2026