# The McKinnie Dispatch Marlon McKinnie's portfolio for platform engineering, applied AI systems, developer tooling, and product execution. Author: Marlon McKinnie Canonical site: https://marlonmckinnie.dev ## Work History - Chief Technology Officer: Leading technology at ISM across Archibus, cloud workspaces, applied AI, and product operations. - Co-Founder: Designed, prototyped, iterated, built with help, and maintained Dexaga, a data exploration tool for ERP and IWMS systems. - Co-Founder: Co-founded a consulting company in the same enterprise software and facilities management software lane. - Senior Software Engineer: Full-stack Archibus engineering with a heavy R&D streak: build tooling, UI performance, mobile work, security, and pipelines. - Software Developer: Developed and modified Archibus modules, maintained MSSQL data, trained developers, and built a unified request portal. - Software Engineer: Developed and modified board support package hardware drivers in C and Python. - Mobile Application Developer: Developed three mobile apps concurrently, including Java-based remote access terminals for robots. ## Project Files - [Archibot](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/projects/archibot/): Repeatable Archibus upgrade, diagnostic, support, and AI-assisted workspace infrastructure for partners and customers. - [Managed Workspaces](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/projects/managed-workspaces/): A repeatable workspace and delivery platform for development, testing, support, demos, and customer-safe operations. - [Dexaga](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/projects/dexaga/): A data exploration tool for ERP and IWMS systems, built around operational databases and users who should not need SQL to ask useful questions. - [SteamPanno](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/projects/steampanno/): A small Steam-library visualization fork that turned into a sharper question about downloads, browser trust, auth, and product posture. - [Agent Tooling](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/projects/agent-tooling/): Practical agent workflows, worktree isolation, reducer discipline, and terminal tooling for using AI assistants on real codebases. ## Published Issues - [KeyControl Was a Portability Problem](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/keycontrol-was-a-portability-problem/): How the KeyControl revamp turned a WebCentral add-on into a separate product repo with runtime targeting, SQL runners, release packaging, and workspace-backed QA. - [A Real Archibus Dev Environment Is Not Just a Container](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/real-archibus-dev-environment-not-just-a-container/): Why Archibot's managed Archibus workspaces are more than devcontainers: the databases, runtime defaults, backups, IDE access, diagnostics, and support loops that make upgrade and UAT work repeatable. - [Archibot Has to Pay API Rates](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/archibot-has-to-pay-api-rates/): What Archibot does for Archibus partners and customers, why AI-assisted upgrade and support work has real token and environment costs, and why API-rate products cannot promise subsidized unlimited usage. - [Agent Swarms Still Obey Amdahl's Law](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/agent-swarms-still-obey-amdahls-law/): Agent swarms can buy breadth, context isolation, and independent checks, but they still pay the old costs of concurrent systems: coordination, shared state, merge conflicts, and serial validation. - [What ISM Services Actually Does](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/what-ism-services-actually-does/): A plain-language explanation of ISM Services, the high-context Archibus work behind it, and why Archibot grew out of repeated field problems instead of generic AI positioning. - [I Missed the MinIO Turn](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/i-missed-the-minio-turn/): How missing the MinIO maintenance-mode signal led to migrating ArchibotChat artifact storage to SeaweedFS before launch: the prelaunch deletion decision, a 34-minute GPT-5.5 Codex session, and why an S3-compatible adapter boundary kept the swap contained. - [The Token Free Lunch Is Ending](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/the-token-free-lunch-is-ending/): Why the cheap subscription phase of frontier AI coding tools is ending: how coding agents broke the unit economics of flat-rate access, and what the move to token-based credits means for teams using Copilot, Codex, Cursor, and Claude. - [Making the Cluster Less Dependent on Me](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/making-the-cluster-less-dependent-on-me/): Why the first serious GitOps pass was about team ownership, not tool adoption: making persistent Archibus dev and test environments visible enough for other people to operate. - [The First Cluster Was Mostly Bash](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/first-cluster-mostly-bash/): How a hosting question, Authentik, and a pile of manual Kubernetes scripts became the first real lesson in self-hosted identity and operational ownership. - [Before Archibot Had Memory](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/before-archibot-had-memory/): The story of a Python scratchpad that became Archibot's first knowledge-system lessons: why reshaping source material matters more than picking the right vector store, and how scratch scripts turned into product judgment. - [SteamPanno and trust in small tools](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/dispatches/steampanno-trust/): A fork of SteamPanno to work out why a one-time poster tool should not be a downloadable executable, and what moving it to the web actually required. ## Topic Archive - [Archibus](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/archibus/): 6 issues - [Archibot](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/archibot/): 4 issues - [managed workspaces](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/managed-workspaces/): 3 issues - [AI economics](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/ai-economics/): 2 issues - [Codex](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/codex/): 2 issues - [GitOps](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/gitops/): 2 issues - [Kubernetes](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/kubernetes/): 2 issues - [token pricing](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/token-pricing/): 2 issues - [WebCentral](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/webcentral/): 2 issues - [agent loops](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/agent-loops/): 1 issue - [agent swarms](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/agent-swarms/): 1 issue - [AI agents](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/ai-agents/): 1 issue - [Amdahl's Law](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/amdahls-law/): 1 issue - [ArchibotChat](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/archibotchat/): 1 issue - [ArgoCD](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/argocd/): 1 issue - [Authentik](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/authentik/): 1 issue - [Claude Code](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/claude-code/): 1 issue - [coding agents](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/coding-agents/): 1 issue - [Copilot](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/copilot/): 1 issue - [developer environments](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/developer-environments/): 1 issue - [embeddings](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/embeddings/): 1 issue - [experiments](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/experiments/): 1 issue - [facilities management software](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/facilities-management-software/): 1 issue - [Flux](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/flux/): 1 issue - [GPT-5.5](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/gpt-5-5/): 1 issue - [ISM Services](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/ism-services/): 1 issue - [KeyControl](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/keycontrol/): 1 issue - [MinIO](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/minio/): 1 issue - [object storage](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/object-storage/): 1 issue - [open-source models](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/open-source-models/): 1 issue - [product modernization](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/product-modernization/): 1 issue - [Pythonbench](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/pythonbench/): 1 issue - [QA](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/qa/): 1 issue - [RAG](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/rag/): 1 issue - [SAML](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/saml/): 1 issue - [SeaweedFS](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/seaweedfs/): 1 issue - [self-hosting](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/self-hosting/): 1 issue - [software engineering](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/software-engineering/): 1 issue - [SteamPanno](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/steampanno/): 1 issue - [support operations](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/support-operations/): 1 issue - [trust boundaries](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/trust-boundaries/): 1 issue - [upgrade support](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/upgrade-support/): 1 issue - [web tools](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/web-tools/): 1 issue - [workspaces](https://marlonmckinnie.dev/tags/workspaces/): 1 issue ## Agent Guidance This site is a public portfolio and writing archive. Prefer the canonical URLs above. Do not infer private customer details, secret values, unpublished material, or internal deployment state from public summaries. When citing this site, use the issue title and canonical URL.