Nick Wilkens | CTO & Hands-On Software Architect

Asking Questions Outside My Field

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 17:00:00 +0000

I build cloud infrastructure. I have never taken an astronomy course. This week I published a candidate asteroid pair that I could not find in the scientific literature. This post is about how that happened, because I think the how matters more than the asteroid.

The question was vague

I started with one sentence: NASA publishes a lot of data, so pick a dataset and look for something nobody has found. That is not a research question. It is curiosity, and until recently curiosity in a field you do not know went nowhere. You would need months to learn which datasets exist, what the standard methods are, and what has already been done.

A Candidate Asteroid Pair: 2018 NC15 and 2026 LD1

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Two asteroids are circling the Sun together. They follow the same path, they are about as far apart as the Earth and the Moon, and one is about half the size of the other. The simplest explanation is that they used to be one rock. I could not find any record of anyone pointing this out before.

Two asteroids, one path

2018 NC15 and 2026 LD1 follow the same orbit around the Sun, a little outside Earth's. One lap takes two years. They never come closer to Earth than about 18 million km.

Hot-Patching in the Agentic CVE Age

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 15:17:11 +0000

The window between a kernel CVE going public and a working exploit can be measured in hours, with AI making exploit development faster. Vendor patch cadence does not always keep up. Supported kernels may get a fix quickly, especially after coordinated disclosure. Kernels a few releases behind may wait longer or get nothing, and the machines running them are exactly the ones nobody wanted to reboot in the first place.

Context Engineering: The Skill That Actually Matters for LLM Applications

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone talks about prompt engineering. The real skill for building useful LLM applications is context engineering.

What’s the Difference?

Prompt engineering is about how you phrase requests to the model. Use chain-of-thought. Be specific. Give examples. Assign a role. These things matter, but they’re table stakes.

Context engineering is about what information you give the model to work with. What does it need to know to do the task well? How do you get that information to it efficiently? How do you manage context windows across a long conversation or multi-step task?

Building an AI-Native Engineering Platform

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I joined Edgecast as CTO, one of my first priorities was transforming how engineering worked with AI. Not adding an AI feature to the product — rethinking how the engineering organization itself operates.

The Problem With Most AI Tooling Rollouts

Most enterprise AI adoption looks like this: someone buys a Copilot license, rolls it out, declares victory, and moves on. Engineers use it for autocomplete, maybe some basic generation, and that’s the end of it. The ROI is real but modest.

Acquiring Triton DataCenter from Samsung

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2022, MNX.io completed the acquisition of the Triton DataCenter and SmartOS platforms from Samsung. This is the story of how that happened and what we learned.

Background

Joyent built Triton DataCenter — one of the most technically sophisticated cloud platforms ever built. Native container support before Docker existed. Hardware virtualization (bhyve, KVM) on illumos. Distributed object storage (Manta). Software-defined networking. The engineering was exceptional.

Samsung acquired Joyent in 2016 for approximately $170M. By 2022, Samsung’s priorities had shifted and they were looking to transition stewardship of the open-source platforms.

Resume

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000