Aaron Alaniz

Discipline

I spent most of 2025 triaging and debugging system behaviors. Thankless, but important work that I certainly used AI to help with, but not exactly an area where AI shines. Now, it's a time for building and like many engineers, I find myself re-learning how to build and

Omarchy Trial

There is a lot of sameness in technology these days ­and while convergence is fine, it's nice to explore. The announcement of Omarchy­ – an opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup – reminded me of the early Android days when you could flash custom ROMs and experiment with opinionated Android forks.

A Week with Cursor

Technology waves swell, crest, break onto shore, and then, some time later, mobile developers show up, board in hand. I committed to using Cursor exclusively for a week as my daily driver editor. A week provides hardly enough time to consider replacing Android Studio, but it's long enough

Rollout to UI Tests

Test authors may focus on new changes or additions, potentially overlooking regressions in existing features that should remain stable. One way to help retain functionality or perhaps catch some unexpected integration issues is to "roll out to tests". This feels obvious—of course, you are going to enable

First Time Experience Authoring a Kotlin DSL

I recently came across a file commented with // TODO convert to DSL. I use this file frequently and while I thought it could be improved, it had never occurred to me that a DSL would help. Feeling curious and motivated by holiday down time, I attempted the task. I have

Aaron Alaniz © 2026