Pillars of Creation captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

Derek Honerlaw

Evolving through experiences.

AboutPostsProjects

I am Derek, a software engineering leader. People are at the center of everything I do. The best software comes from teams that actually want to be there and trust each other.

I also never stopped building. New programming languages, paradigms, tooling, whatever. If it moves the craft forward I am probably already experimenting with it.

Here I write about what I am building, learning, and thinking through.

Recent Writing

Migrating a platform without a mandate

Building the framework was the easy part. Getting dozens of teams to adopt it took a playbook, and AI is starting to rewrite that playbook.

June 2026

How I Got My Platform Team to Actually Adopt AI Tooling

Four principles and a lightweight system that got a platform team from AI-curious to AI-native in a few months.

May 2026

How I operate

What to expect if you work with me or for me.

January 2026

Projects

Seekless

A job search platform that crawls company job boards and uses hybrid semantic search to surface relevant positions from natural language queries.

WebMobileAIPersonal

SoberJourney

A gentle tool to help you notice time since your last action. Track any habit, any goal, at your own pace. No judgment, just support.

MobilePersonal