Oʻahu right now: 3.6 ft swell at 6 s out of the SSE on the south shore buoy, water 82°F. Sunset 6:18 pm HST. Updated Oct 2, 2:49 pm HST
Hi, I'm Rob. I help software teams adopt AI so they can build better software, and I've spent 20 years teaching developers through books, courses, videos, and conference talks. I live in Honolulu, where I run Big Machine and I'm building Kōlea.
The surf report above updates from NOAA buoy data a few times a day.
Kōlea is a newsletter and sales platform for people who write and sell what they make. You write once, it goes to your list and onto your own site, and every sale gets traced back to the email that made it. It has a slop meter that catches machine-sounding writing before your readers do, and no AI is involved in that part. It's the best software I've ever made.
Big Machine is where my books and courses live, along with the newsletter. It's also where I do AI adoption consulting: helping a team skill up so they build better things, not only faster ones.
Code I'm keeping warm right now:
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
| moebius | A functional query tool for Elixir and Postgres. Ten years old and still maintained. |
| dox | A document database API for Postgres, written in PL/pgSQL. |
| pg-auth | A complete authentication system built inside Postgres with schemas and functions. |
| kolea | Broadcasts, drip sequences, and transactional email in one Cloudflare Worker. |
| champion | An adversarial AI council for your professional life, as a Claude Code plugin. |
- The Imposter's Handbook: a computer science primer for self-taught developers. Two years of research, a year of writing, and years of revisions since. Over 30,000 copies.
- This Developer's Life: the podcast I made with Scott Hanselman. It was the number one tech podcast for a while, which still surprises me.
- massive-js and Massive: the tiny data access tools I wrote for Node and .NET. Massive kicked off the micro ORM thing in the Microsoft world. Both live with their current maintainers now.
- SubSonic: the data access tool I extracted from the ASP.NET Commerce Starter Kit, back when Scott Guthrie hired me to work on it.
- A Curious Moon: a science fiction story and a Postgres tutorial at the same time. The company in it, Red:4 Aerospace, is the company I work under today.
- Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, written with Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Scott Guthrie. We called ourselves the Five Heads. Hairline joke.
- Newsletter: Why I stopped writing exacting prompts Sep 28, 2026
- Video: Why Claude Writes Better Code Than I Do Jun 9, 2026
bigmachine.io · Newsletter · YouTube · LinkedIn · X · Kōlea · Email
If you want help getting your team working well with AI, bigmachine.io is the place to start.
Surf data from NOAA buoy 51211 (Pearl Harbor entrance). The surf line and the Latest section are updated by a small script on a schedule.