The Door-to-Door Man's Guide to 2026

I am the Chief Software Architect. I make design choices, set standards—technical, coding, tools, and platform. I am responsible for all of it. As the Vice President of Development of a big/small software company in the small/big city, I was deeply entrenched in the integration business, inside the managed matrix of upper-middle management.

I have come to understand that you are looking for me and I am ready to take the red pill. Together we can meet rich celebrities, swim in their pools and live off the FAT of the LANd.net—Fully Automated Tech, now on a GLP-1 diet, lean and mean and ready to disrupt.

While waiting for you to find me, I have adopted a part-time career of selling doors, door-to-door. Life is tough for a door-to-door man like me, caught up in the web. For the most part, people simply aren't interested in doors anymore and rarely will they open their door to strangers.

Sure they will vibe code with Claude and ChatGPT, mint NFTs nobody asked for, prompt engineer their way to mediocrity, and claim they're "building in public" while their GitHub shows three commits from 2019. They'll chase the next memecoin, explain how this time crypto is definitely going mainstream, and insist their startup's AI agent will replace entire industries—all day long. But Face2Face IRL? So long and thanks for all the fish!

Occasionally lonely people invite me in just to have someone to talk to. All they want to do is sit and drink Java (the beverage, not the language—nobody touches that anymore), eat Apples (the fruit, not the stock), and endlessly discuss how GenAI will solve everything while simultaneously making us all obsolete. They speak in tongues about "agents" and "reasoning models" and "context windows" as if these words are incantations that will summon venture capital from thin air.

When I politely suggest we return to first principles thinking—you know, actually understanding the problem before throwing tokens at it—they grow uncomfortable. When I mention doors, they say they're tired of legacy thinking and I am shown their door.

Sometimes people call me up to say they may be interested in a door, but only if it comes with a blockchain, runs inference on-device, and has been trained on synthetic data generated by other AI models in an ouroboros of digital madness. I show up, attempt to explain load-bearing fundamentals and the time-tested principles of hinges, and have their door slammed in my face.

You can see how tough it is for a door-to-door man like me. Maybe it's time to switch to containers, embrace the serverless void, and vote for Pedro! Or perhaps just remember that before we automate everything, we should understand what we're automating and why.

Seriously Though

I am an excellent technical leader, experienced and mature and deeply concerned about my craft. In an era of vibe coding and autocomplete-driven development, I still believe in:

• First principles thinking: Understanding the fundamentals before adding layers of abstraction

• Sustainable architecture: Not every problem needs a neural network

• Human judgment: AI is a tool, not a replacement for experience and wisdom

• Real value: Building things that matter, not just things that sound impressive in a pitch deck

The technology changes—from mainframes to microservices, from CGI scripts to containerized cloud functions, from rule-based systems to large language models—but the principles remain. Good architecture. Clear thinking. Solving real problems for real people.

Perhaps you can open some doors for me.

Sincerely,
Marc J. Greenberg

P.S. If there is no way for us to network and share, perhaps I can interest you in a nice door. A real one. With hinges. No blockchain required.

Come visit me at codemarc.net—we can talk about doors, the cloud, and experiencing teenage angst at 50-something. It's time to build something that lasts.