This is the homepage and blog of Wesley Dean https://wesleydean.com en-us Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT An exploration of consent, legality, morality, and human dignity in the age of AI-generated artifacts and synthetic representation. — In the first part of this essay, I argued that many conversations about artificial intelligence become more understandable when we stop focusing exclusively on artifacts and begin focusing on the people connected to them. A photograph is not merely image data. A voice recording is not merely a... https://wesleydean.com/blog/consent_in_the_age_of_ai_part_2/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/consent_in_the_age_of_ai_part_2/ Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT In a post on Documentation and AI , I advocated for the use of Doxygen-style comments when developing and maintaining shell scripts to preserve intent, contracts, interfaces, edge-cases, and context information. An AI wouldn't need to reinterpret how a block of Bash shell script code worked every... https://wesleydean.com/blog/bash_help_documentation_project/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/bash_help_documentation_project/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT A reflection on AI, federal data stewardship, and the realization that consent is ultimately about the people connected to information. — The first time I seriously considered using artificial intelligence in my professional work, the answer was already decided. No. The decision was not mine to make. At the time, I was working on federal projects with significant security and compliance requirements. Public large language models... https://wesleydean.com/blog/consent_in_the_age_of_ai_part_1/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/consent_in_the_age_of_ai_part_1/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT An introduction to a three-part essay series exploring AI, consent, dignity, and the moral questions raised when human work, likeness, voice, and identity become reusable data. — Artificial intelligence has made old questions feel newly urgent. We can now collect, store, analyze, imitate, synthesize, and reproduce human expression at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago. A photograph can become image data. A voice can become a sample. A body... https://wesleydean.com/blog/consent_in_the_age_of_ai/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/consent_in_the_age_of_ai/ Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT How metrics lead us to a skewed and incomplete understanding of a system and that misunderstanding is amplified by AI and LLM-assisted coding; capturing intent through documentation can help capture what metrics miss while reducing drift and preserving intention — In my news feed, I recently saw a post from TechCrunch that talked about "tokenmaxxing" and how the use of LLM token usage as a metric for developer productivity wasn't having the desired effect. The article pointed out how various metrics over the years have been varying degrees of... https://wesleydean.com/blog/metrics_intent_drift_and_documentation/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/metrics_intent_drift_and_documentation/ Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The union of leadership and ethical AI usage — I was in a conversation about AI and Leadership recently and a number of themes were common while some were less so. We were discussing someone who was trying to position themselves as a thought leader by regularly posting articles that showed all of the hallmarks of having been written by AI. Using... https://wesleydean.com/blog/ai_and_leadership/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/ai_and_leadership/ Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Techniques for improving collaboration in the workplace — Additional patterns that support the same values The three ideas I mentioned are the core of what I would recommend. There are also several supporting patterns that reinforce the same values. Use bounded collaboration windows Pairing, mobbing, and shared working sessions can be excellent tools when... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-6/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-6/ Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Techniques for improving collaboration in the workplace — What Better Collaboration Looks Like in Practice In the first two parts of this series, I argued that some collaboration models carry costs their advocates rarely name clearly enough. On the human side, continuous managed availability can create chronic vigilance, bodily constraint, public... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-5/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-5/ Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT How collaboration modes can harm productivity and effectiveness — Misallocated talent is a business problem This point deserves to be stated plainly: flattening distinct engineers into generic units of "senior technical labor" is commercially irrational, not just dehumanizing. Highly experienced people are costly for a reason. They are not merely faster... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-4/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-4/ Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT How collaboration modes can harm productivity and effectiveness — The Productivity Cost Nobody Wants to Measure In the first part of this series, I focused on the human cost of collaboration models that become continuous managed availability. I wrote about chronic vigilance, neurological load, public diminishment, flattened expertise, and the quiet way a process... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-3/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-3/ Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT What are the costs extracted from mobbing all day long — Public Diminishment For a genuinely senior engineer, the damage in a system of continuous availability is not limited to inconvenience. A person can have decades of experience, published work, and deep mastery in one domain, then be placed into a public workflow built around unfamiliar tools, alien... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-2/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-2/ Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Extending MegaLinter with plugins — MegaLinter is an excellent piece of software that ships with support for more than 130 linters, scanners, formatters, style checkers, and policy enforcement tools. Even with all of this functionality, there can be times when you need something that's just not available out of the box. Fortunately,... https://wesleydean.com/blog/megalinter_plugins/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/megalinter_plugins/ Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT What are the costs extracted from mobbing all day long — Joel Spolsky's eighth item in the Joel Test asked a deceptively simple question: do programmers have quiet working conditions? In 2000, that question was often about cubicles, doors, offices, and noise. In 2026, the question runs deeper. The modern threat to serious engineering work is not only a... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-1/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability-1/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT When collaboration and continuous availability become challenges — When Collaboration Becomes Continuous Managed Availability Joel Spolsky's eighth item in the Joel Test asked a deceptively simple question: do programmers have quiet working conditions? In 2000, that question often pointed to the obvious things: noisy offices, cubicles, interruptions, and the basic... https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/collaboration_continuous_availability/ Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The value of being polite when talking with an LLM — Why I Still Say "Please" to the Machine There is a practical case against being polite to AI. It is not foolish. It is not unserious. In a narrow and measurable sense, it is correct. Every extra "please," every "thank you," every softening phrase, every sentence added... https://wesleydean.com/blog/why-i-still-say-please-to-the-machine/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/why-i-still-say-please-to-the-machine/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Using ADRs to constrain AI-assisted development and preserve intent — From Intent to Constraints In a previous article, I argued that documentation matters more in AI-assisted development because it preserves intent across repeated machine-mediated revisions. This article picks up where that argument leaves off: if documentation matters, which kind matters most? How... https://wesleydean.com/blog/adrs_and_generative_ai/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/adrs_and_generative_ai/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT What happens when creativity is reduced to ones and zeroes? — I feel a sense of existential dread. Not the old dread -- although that never went away -- a new one. Many years ago, skilled tradespeople worked hard to build great things like chairs and bookshelves and bed frames and sinks. Human beings would devote years and years to perfecting their craft and... https://wesleydean.com/blog/creativity-and-ai/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/creativity-and-ai/ Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Why documentation matters now more than ever — Documentation Is Not Dead in the Age of AI. It Matters More Than Ever. LLMs (Large Language Models) and AI are very good at producing code quickly. Sometimes, AI can generate in minutes what would take an experienced developer days to write. It's similarly very common to use AI to "update this... https://wesleydean.com/blog/documentation_and_ai/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/documentation_and_ai/ Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT When your AI / LLM says it'll do the thing.. eventually. — I recently wrote about how LLM hallucinations are unfortunate, several failure models, and how to work around them. This is a rewrite of that article for a more technical audience. Same advice, same problems, just worded differently. Long Processing This one is my least favorite pattern. It sounds... https://wesleydean.com/blog/hallucination_delays_technical/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/hallucination_delays_technical/ Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT When your AI / LLM says it'll do the thing.. eventually. — LLMs Don’t "Do" Things, They Talk About Doing Things Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT can be incredibly helpful. They can explain ideas, rewrite emails, summarize documents, and answer questions in seconds. But there’s something important to understand: They don’t actually do... https://wesleydean.com/blog/hallucination_delays/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/hallucination_delays/ Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Getting Renovate to run locally in Jenkins to approximate Dependabot — All of the repositories I own on GitHub -- public and private -- have Dependabot configured to update repository dependencies. Since almost all repos have at least MegaLinter configured to run when commits are added to a pull request, there's always something that needs to be watched. My default... https://wesleydean.com/blog/renovate_jenkins/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/renovate_jenkins/ Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Getting Ollama (LLM) running in a jail on a FreeBSD-based TrueNAS CORE system — The Hardware NAS Server (Alhoon) I have a pretty beefy system in my home lab to provide Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services. The system has dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 processors running at 2.70GHz with a total of 32 cores. The NAS server has 128GB of RAM, but no GPU. What it lacks in... https://wesleydean.com/blog/jailed_ollama/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/jailed_ollama/ Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT An update on how scrum worked over the last year — Background In December of 2024, I talked about using scrum around the holidays to manage and schedule household activities. Here's the link: How We Used Scrum to Schedule our Holidays What we were really trying to protect was peace: fewer surprises and more shared clarity. A few things have changed,... https://wesleydean.com/blog/update_on_household_scrum/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/update_on_household_scrum/ Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT A few short updates on Wes Dean's FOSS projects — I maintain a few Free / Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, most of which are hosted on GitHub under my GitHub.com/wesley-dean account. Here are the highlights: upload-sarif-to-defectdojo now has cleaner documentation, better git branch detection, error messages, improved dry-run functionality,... https://wesleydean.com/blog/202602_project_updates/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/202602_project_updates/ Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT a walk through security incident essentials for everyone, from designers to developers, sales to security engineering, entry-level to executive" — How Can Security Incident Essentials Help Mitigate Major Breaches A departure from my MegaLinter articles on Flexion's blog, this is an exploration of security incident essentials and how they can help manage the impact of major breaches. https://wesleydean.com/blog/how_security_incident_essentials_can_help_mitigate_major_breaches/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/how_security_incident_essentials_can_help_mitigate_major_breaches/ Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT How to use Let's Encrypt SSL / TLS Certificates with RouterOS — Background Mikrotik produces a variety of exceptional networking products including routers, switches, access points, and much more. Many of their devices run an operating system known as RouterOS. RouterOS provides a variety of interfaces, including a terminal, a web interface, API access, and... https://wesleydean.com/blog/letsencrypt_routeros_ssl/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/letsencrypt_routeros_ssl/ Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT How we used Agile planning to manage our holiday break — Background Every year, I take a few weeks away from work in order to disconnect, recover, and change my routines. A few years ago, I took three weeks off fo work and it was transformative. I was active, I lost some weight, my blood pressure went down, my energy went up, and I was able to come back... https://wesleydean.com/blog/how_we_used_scrum_to_schedule_our_holidays/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/how_we_used_scrum_to_schedule_our_holidays/ Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Tuning MegaLinter for Optimal Performance — MegaLinter Performance Tuning The fourth of my articles about MegaLinter on Flexion's blog, here's a process for Tuning MegaLinter for Optimal Performance and save time and money! https://wesleydean.com/blog/megalinter-performance-tuning/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/megalinter-performance-tuning/ Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Tips and Tricks to Unlock MegaLinters Full Potential — MegaLinter Tips and Tricks to Unlock its Full Potential The third in my series on MegaLinter on Flexion's blog, here are Tips and Tricks to Unlock MegaLinter's Full Potential . https://wesleydean.com/blog/megalinter-tips-and-tricks/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/megalinter-tips-and-tricks/ Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT a step-by-step guide on getting started with MegaLinter — How to Get Started with MegaLinter: a Step-by-Step Guide The second of my MegaLinter articles on Flexion's blog, this is a step-by-step guide to getting started with MegaLinter . https://wesleydean.com/blog/how-to-get-started-with-megalinter-a-step-by-step-guide/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/how-to-get-started-with-megalinter-a-step-by-step-guide/ Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Five ways MegaLinter Upped our DevSecOps Game: Flexion Blog — 5 Ways MegaLinter Upped our DevSecOps Game Check out my post on Flexion's blog describing 5 Ways MegaLinter Upped our DevSecOps Game ! https://wesleydean.com/blog/5-ways-megalinter-upped-our-devsecops-game/ https://wesleydean.com/blog/5-ways-megalinter-upped-our-devsecops-game/ Wed, 29 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT