# Rōger Nōden

> Personal website and blog of Rōger Nōden, Vice President of Software
> Engineering at an AI-first company. Writing on software engineering, AI,
> engineering leadership, movies, electric vehicles, cooking, and the outdoors.

## About

- [About](https://rogernoden.com/about): Who Rōger is and what this site covers.
- [Blog Posts](https://rogernoden.com/posts): Full chronological index of posts.
- [Projects](https://rogernoden.com/projects/): Selected projects and work.

## Blog posts

- [Nobody Changed the Code. It Still Broke.](https://rogernoden.com/2026/06/nobody-changed-the-code-it-still-broke/): A production Lambda started crashing on startup with no code change behind it. The cause was a three-way collision between a new AWS runtime, an old bundled library, and a routine dependency upgrad...
- [AI Made Building Free. Your Org Still Has a Speed Limit.](https://rogernoden.com/2026/06/org-speed-limit/): The sequel to "It Moved the Constraint." Building is nearly free now, but organizations still absorb change at a stubbornly human rate — and Goldratt told us forty years ago what to do about a bott...
- [Camping at Leech Lake — June 2026](https://rogernoden.com/2026/06/camping-leech-lake/): Two cool, cloudy nights at Leech Lake with Jayson, Echo, and Dee OhGee — a spotless Corps of Engineers campground, some off-road forest trails up toward Lake Winnie, a balky stove, and a menu that ...
- [AI Didn't Kill Agile. It Just Moved the Constraint.](https://rogernoden.com/2026/06/ai-moved-the-bottleneck/): Agile was built to ration scarce engineering. AI made building cheap, so the bottleneck moved downstream — to whether anyone can actually absorb what we ship. The gates we built to protect capacity...
- [Camping at Lake Winni Dam — Memorial Day Weekend 2026](https://rogernoden.com/2026/05/camping-lake-winni-dam/): Three nights at Lake Winni Dam with the R1T and Echo — one of the best Corps of Engineers campgrounds I've visited, plus gear notes and a menu built around one pound of ribeye.
- [Your Backlog Is a Conversation. Your AI Agents Need a Contract.](https://rogernoden.com/2026/04/backlog-contract-for-ai-agents/): User stories assume humans will fill in the gaps. Autonomous agents don't. Here's how to turn tickets into machine-ready contracts — and why the backlog is becoming the real interface between inten...
- [Introducing Lamplit: A Word Puzzle Game from Alpine Blue](https://rogernoden.com/2026/03/lamplit/): Alpine Blue is building Lamplit — an acrostic puzzle game for iOS rooted in the Victorian tradition of wordplay. We're in early beta, and here's what we've been making.
- [Building with AI Without Drowning in Technical Debt](https://rogernoden.com/2025/09/building-with-ai/): AI makes it fast to ship—but just as fast to harden bad design. Here’s a practical approach I use to keep speed without compounding debt.
- [Measuring Success as a Scrum Team: Beyond Outcomes](https://rogernoden.com/2025/07/measuring-scrum-master-success/): Discover a comprehensive framework for measuring Scrum Team success that goes beyond traditional outcomes to include behaviors, leadership capacity, and team sustainability
- [✨ How to Generate Commit Messages with AI in Visual Studio Code](https://rogernoden.com/2025/04/ai-generated-commit-messages-vscode/): Learn how to save time and write better commit messages using AI tools in VS Code
- [The Power of Named Chats/Channels](https://rogernoden.com/2025/02/power-of-named-chats/): How using named chats and channels can transform your digital communication and boost team productivity
- [Using Cursor - the AI Editor](https://rogernoden.com/2025/02/using-cursor-ai-editor/): Exploring my experience with Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that's changing how we write code
- [Migrating My Outsell Rules to Gmail Filters](https://rogernoden.com/2025/02/gmail-filters/): 5 Filters to Rule Them All.
- [The Blog Question Challenge](https://rogernoden.com/2025/01/blog-challenge/): I have accepted this fun challenge and this is my entry.
- [Navigating Time References in Tech Documents: A Friendly Guide](https://rogernoden.com/2025/01/time-references/): Words like "currently" and "now" can sometimes create more confusion than clarity, so let's break it down!
- [Site Beginnings](https://rogernoden.com/2025/01/site-beginning/): Hello world! <– The obligatory first thing for any programmer.

## Optional

- [Categories](https://rogernoden.com/categories/): Posts grouped by category.
- [Tags](https://rogernoden.com/tags/): Posts grouped by tag.
- [Full text for agents](https://rogernoden.com/llms-full.txt): Concatenated full text of all posts.
- [RSS feed](https://rogernoden.com/feed.xml): Subscribe to new posts.