ABOUT
Late Night Development
A journal about the part of shipping software that actually makes teams fast — reproducible environments, safe delivery pipelines, and, more recently, AI used with the same discipline as everything else that touches production.
What's here
- The container series — turning "works on my machine" into a repeatable, versioned system: dev containers, CI, preview environments, migrations, and a real release path.
- The AI development series — treating AI coding tools as fast, scoped systems that get reviewed like any other change, not as unsupervised teammates.
- Field Notes — one-page, practical references you can download and actually use, not another PDF that sits unread.
- No hype, no vendor pitch — just what held up in production and what didn't.
Why it exists
Most writing about architecture and delivery is either a vendor pitch or a conference-talk highlight reel. This is neither. It's notes from the parts of the job that don't make it into the demo — the environment setup that eats a new hire's first week, the migration that goes wrong at 2 a.m., the AI-generated patch that looks fine until someone actually reads the diff.
It's written by Patrick Irvin, a cloud and DevOps architecture leader who spends his days moving teams off fragile, manual delivery and onto systems they can actually run. The material here comes from that work, not from theory.
Written after hours, when there's finally time to write down what actually worked.