Ryan Spletzer

The repo: github.com/ryanspletzer...

MCP pushed me back into looking at OAuth extension specs, and I found myself in a spider web of browser tabsm so I decided to make a Mermaid graph diagram in a GitHub repo to visualize the specs and their reference relationships.

A wooden marionette with a long nose sits at a developer’s desk, strings tied to floating "PROMPT" and code icons, facing a monitor where a flow diagram ends at a glowing "DEPLOY" button; a loose cable and a shelf labeled "TOYS" underscore the fragile, toy-like nature of the build.

We’re living in the age of "vibe coding"—where it’s easier than ever to generate something that looks real.

But just because Pinocchio can sing and dance doesn’t mean he’s a real boy...

www.spletzer.com/2025/09/pino...

A conceptual diagram titled "Ask vs Act: Applying CQRS Principles to AI Agents." The diagram has two halves. On the left, a blue bubble labeled "Reading" connects downward to a smaller bubble labeled "RAG," which points to an icon representing documents and a database. On the right, an orange bubble labeled "Writing" connects downward to a smaller bubble labeled "Actions," which points to icons of a checkmark in a speech bubble and a gear. The two halves are connected side by side, visually contrasting how AI agents handle reading (retrieval) versus writing (actions).

I wrote a post about applying CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) principles to AI agents. www.spletzer.com/2025/08/ask-...

A minimalist graphic with the phrase “MCP is a USB port, not a hard drive” in bold black text on a light blue gradient background. Below the text are two black icons: a USB port on the left and a hard drive on the right, separated by a “not equal to” (≠) symbol, emphasizing the conceptual difference.

I wrote a blog post to try to disambiguate what MCP can and can't do, and what it is and is not.

www.spletzer.com/2025/08/mcp-...

YouTube video by The Pragmatic Engineer Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho

If you haven't had a chance to watch this Pragmatic Engineer interview with Gergely Orosz and Laura Tacho, I highly highly highly recommend it.

So many pull quotes from this discussion that resonated with me, thinking "Yes! Finally! Someone is saying it!" 🙂

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHHl...

A stylized illustration of an 'Information Diet' pyramid. The pyramid is divided into four layers from bottom to top: books, speech bubbles, and newspapers at the base; social media icons and short-form content in the middle; the Twitter bird icon in the upper tier; and a microchip labeled 'AI' at the top. The design uses muted shades of beige, blue, and orange to convey different types of information sources.

I wrote a post about your information diet in the age of AI.

www.spletzer.com/2025/07/your...

It is spelled: Copilot.

Not CoPilot.

Not Co-pilot.

Not Co-Pilot.

Copilot.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. 🙃

Wow. “These changes are meant to address what Microsoft sees as lagging internal adoption of its Copilot AI services, according to another two people with knowledge of the plans.”

It sounds like some of the lack of adoption is people using competitor’s tools.

A digital illustration titled "The Many Contexts of Model Context Protocol" shows a central AI model icon connected by lines to four surrounding icons: a desktop computer (local context), a cloud server (remote/server context), an office building (enterprise or multi-tenant context), and a person (user context). Each icon is enclosed in a circle with colorful backgrounds, symbolizing different deployment and usage contexts of MCP servers.

I wrote about the hidden complexities of running Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers locally vs remotely, and why deployment context shapes everything from auth to architecture.

👉 www.spletzer.com/2025/05/the-...

The curse of social media: not just for software engineering but other areas as I observe (say, hiring, investing, product management, venture capital etc)

Those the best at their craft are usually busy building not writing/posting. Viral posts often wrong in many ways etc
Via @icooper.bsky.social

Illustration for a blog post titled "Enterprise Search and the Myth of the Silver Bullet." The image features a large magnifying glass pointing from a search interface on the left to a silver bullet on the right. Abstract clouds and dots decorate the beige background, and the title is written in bold dark blue text.

I wrote a post about the area of enterprise search, where I spent a great deal of time over a decade ago in my career, and whose lessons I’m realizing are more relevant than ever today in the age of AI, RAG, and agents.

www.spletzer.com/2025/05/ente...

Much like the OAuth/OpenID Connect/JWT specs from the past, digesting these types of specifications can be a lot, which is why I took a stab at digesting this myself and distilling it into a blog post for all of you to enjoy.

SPIFFE/SPIRE give us a novel way to derive trust and authentication from the environment itself, which opens up a new world of possibilities and solves several classic problems related to secrets management at scale.

Creating secrets that can rotate other secrets can often feel like a "turtles all the way down" situation... But it doesn't have to be that way!

A generated image of turtles all the way down, courtesy of ChatGPT

I wrote a post about the SPIFFE standard and its accompanying open-source implementation SPIRE.

www.spletzer.com/2025/03/zero...

(Image courtesy of ChatGPT)

I wrote a post about how to build an engineering team from scratch.

www.spletzer.com/2025/02/how-...

I wrote a post about how to get your client_id and client_secret from an app registration in Entra ID (formerly known as Azure AD) since this regularly trips many people up. www.spletzer.com/2025/01/how-...

I wrote a post about my fun side quest to get SpinRite to run on my Apple Silicon-based Mac. www.spletzer.com/2024/12/runn...

Image of book of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

Some light reading.

A practical way to improve your communication skills: a vocal, visual and transcription review.

SQL injection

Bluesky is proof that cryptocurrency isn't a core tenant of decentralization. The team demonstrated extreme levels of pragmatism by leveraging new and existing technologies to produce something people actually use.

I wrote a post reflecting on my participation in Autodesk's COO Leadership Development Program (LDP) over the past six months.

www.spletzer.com/2024/11/san-...

I wrote a post reflecting on my recent experience in Tokyo as part of Autodesk's COO Leadership Development Program.

www.spletzer.com/2024/06/tokyo/

I wrote a post that is a no-nonsense guide to setting up Python environments for local development on various platforms.

Or rather, there's still _some_ inherent nonsense involved in the process, but I've tried my best to minimize it. 🙂

I wrote a post on the importance of experimentation and proofs of concept in de-risking technology decisions and system designs.

I wrote a quick post about a tool that I believe does not get enough hype: Git Credential Manager.

I wrote a blog post touching on the importance of data engineering and data architecture to the further success of organizational AI/ML efforts. www.spletzer.com/2024/02/ai-i...

I wrote a quick post on the scourge that is the random "Hi" DM with no context, in the hopes that we can all be better with one another.

www.spletzer.com/2023/12/hi/