About

I'm Donny MacPhail, an engineer north of Boston focused on building stable, scalable systems and clean architecture. In my 9-5 I work on a React-based sales app and a backend platform that I've been modernizing over time. The work is a mix of new features, reliability improvements, and steady reduction of tech debt. I care a lot about keeping things simple, shipping incrementally, and leaving the codebase better than I found it.

Outside of work I run a small fleet of side projects on one deliberately boring backend: simmr.io, a meal-planning app that treats your week like a deck-building game (draft dinners, lock the week, cook through it), and Name in Common, a baby-name voting app where family and friends swipe and vote on names together. Claude Code does most of the typing on these; I do the deciding. They're my sandbox for agentic systems, LLM workflows, and product experiments, and where I stress-test ideas before writing about them here.

I graduated from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and after years in the city I recently bought a home and moved north of it, out into Massachusetts proper. I enjoy pragmatic engineering, system design, and the occasional vibe-coding session. When I'm not writing code I'm usually cooking, reading, playing with my dog Ted or spending time with my wife Jenn.

How this blog is made

Most posts here start as an AI draft. I build with Claude Code daily, and when something real ships (a migration, an incident, an architecture call that hurt) I have it draft the story while the details are still fresh, working from the actual code, logs, and decisions. Then I edit: cut what I wouldn't say, fix what it got wrong, and sharpen the take until it's mine. Nothing publishes that I can't defend line by line.

Every article is anchored to something that actually happened in a project I run, with the specifics left in. If a draft reads like it could have come from anyone's project, it doesn't ship. That's also why the publishing schedule is irregular; I write when there's something worth writing down, not to feed a cadence.

If you're building in similar areas, I'd love to compare notes.