ss[sean@stoves ~]$ ss

Sean Stoves

SecOps & Platform Engineer at Wizards of the Coast (D&D Beyond), 23+ years deep in systems, security, and software. I came up hardening Linux on bare metal and never lost the instinct. These days it's cloud security, the platform layer, the infrastructure-as-code everything ships on. Security isn't a checklist to me; it's how I read every system I touch.

Off the clock I'm a dad of three boys, a foster parent, a lifelong gamer. I run D&D at the table, but in every game I'm Solao Bajiuik. I keep a stack of game servers alive for friends, stream when the mood strikes. Most of what I build off-hours is for the games and communities I'm part of.

One of the reasons I've decided to start this site with a Blog post is that I want to work on my skills in that area. I will try to post at least weekly; however, I am not the best at writing, so I will follow the process of:

  • Writing an Outline ( Gotta get my thoughts out first )
  • Writing the Rough Draft ( and I mean... ROUGH... )
  • Asking Grammarly for help cleaning it up
  • Asking Claude to compare my writings with my code to ensure and hold me honest ( also to suggest things i might have missed )
  • Updating Draft to contain the above notes
  • Asking Grammarly once again to help clean it up ( I need all the help I can get )
  • Posting.

Because of this process, I don't want to PROMISE posts will occur. However, I promise I will try.

Oddly enough, the above is similar to my method of AI-assisted development.

  • Summarize and Plan features/goal
  • Take the above plan and add notes regarding tech choices and options for the process
  • Plan the order I want to implement
    • Most Critical First e.g.) Auth
    • Then Most Complex
    • Then the easy low-hanging fruit
  • AI then gets sent to review the Plan, I prefer JetBrains Junie with Claude's models for this
  • Once we both agree on the plan, I begin implementation. Should I get stuck or have a large, tedious amount of code, I use Claude to get it done faster, or to teach me.
    • Prompt: Claude, for step 4.1 ( Milestone 4 step 1 ), can you provide me a best practice and secure method and the links and references that support it to handle this task. I then learn how to handle it myself, not just from Claude but also from reference sites. It basically replaced the StackOverflow delve.
  • Once the code is all finished, I ask Claude to read my code, see if I missed any vulnerabilities, and, since I HATE creating them, to make me unit tests(everything) and E2E tests ( if website or mobile )

I then ship and push in whatever CICD method I need. I very rarely deploy manually, and I REFUSE to become a Pull Reviewer for AI, especially when that code is ~90% mine.

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