About me

I’m Brian Detering — a software engineer, educator, and the person behind this site.

By day, I teach programming and software engineering at the University of Southern California. My research covers programming languages, systems architecture, and applied AI. I’ve been writing code professionally for over a decade, building everything from internal tools and APIs to production infrastructure.

This blog is where I share what I actually learn from testing dev tools, frameworks, and workflows. Every review comes from hands-on use — I set up the CI pipeline, run the benchmarks, break things in staging, and write about what I find. No sponsored rankings, no vendor deals, no affiliate-first recommendations.

What I cover: AI coding assistants, DevOps tooling, API testing platforms, security best practices, project management software, and anything else that saves developers real time.

Why this site exists: Too many “best tools” articles are written by people who never installed the tool. I wanted a place where working developers could get honest, experience-based comparisons — the kind of recommendations I’d give a colleague over coffee.

When I’m not teaching or writing, I’m usually benchmarking something new, tinkering with my homelab, or arguing about container orchestration on the internet.

Want to get in touch? Head over to the contact page.