About Jay McBride
Software engineer and technical writer sharing judgment-driven essays on production systems, architecture tradeoffs, AI-assisted development, and the decisions that break at scale.
I’m Jay McBride, a software engineer in Ontario, Canada. I’ve spent 20 years building production systems, shipping client work, hiring developers, and cleaning up decisions that looked smart in a meeting but failed under real traffic.
Jay’s Tech Bites exists for developers who have already outgrown tutorials. If you’ve shipped code, been on call, argued about architecture, or regretted a “future-proof” decision six months later, you’re who I’m writing for.
Who This Site Is For
- Mid-level to senior developers who want judgment, not definitions.
- Solo builders and founders making tradeoffs without a large engineering team.
- Tech leads and hiring managers who care how systems behave after launch.
- Teams trying to sort hype from tools that actually improve delivery.
What I Write About
- Production systems and the failure modes people only learn the hard way.
- Architecture decisions, especially the ones that feel correct before scale exposes the cost.
- Modern web development without framework worship.
- AI-assisted development, answer engines, and how engineering judgment changes when code generation gets cheap.
- Developer career growth, hiring, leadership, and the difference between sounding senior and actually being useful.
What I Believe
- There are almost no universal best practices. There are tradeoffs, contexts, and consequences.
- Simpler systems win more often than clever ones.
- AI can accelerate output, but it does not replace taste, debugging skill, or architectural judgment.
- Tutorials help you start. Experience teaches you what breaks.
- The most valuable technical writing is honest about cost, uncertainty, and second-order effects.
Proof of Work
- 20 years building production software across web, mobile, and client platforms.
- Systems shipped in Rails, Node.js, Go, PHP, and whatever the project actually needed.
- Experience hiring, mentoring, and evaluating developers beyond portfolio theater.
- Real client work where deadlines, budgets, legacy systems, and business constraints all mattered.
Start Here
If you want the clearest picture of what this site is about, start with these:
- The 2026 Web Development Roadmap Nobody’s Saying Out Loud
- I Built a Production iOS App With Rails and No Swift Developer
- Server-Sent Events: When WebSockets Are Overkill (And When They’re Not)
- Why I Stopped Defaulting to React for Every Project
- The Custom Framework You’re Building Will Break Your Team
- Vibe Coding Is Just Prompting with Better Guardrails
Editorial Standards
- I prioritize first-hand experience over recycled summaries.
- I’d rather be narrowly useful than broadly generic.
- If I’m making a strong recommendation, I want the failure mode and the downside on the page too.
- I use AI as a tool, not a ghostwriter with unchecked authority.
Elsewhere
If the writing here saves you time or helps you avoid an expensive mistake, you can buy me a coffee.