Writing
Notes and long-form
79 articles
mobile ·
The check-in app is one web page and two wrappers
A tablet by the door where members check themselves in. It started as a Next.js app, then became an iOS and an Android app that render exactly that page in a WebView and carry no product logic at all. The most instructive part was the subsystem I built, tested, shipped and deleted eight days later.
ai ·
A year with Codex, a week with Astra
ai ·
Onboarding took two days. Now it takes two hours.
on-premise ·
A door on someone else's network
cost ·
$58 a month to keep one container awake
cloud run ·
Ready is not alive
ci/cd ·
Nobody has a service-account key
ai ·
The CSV importer that proposes and never executes
postgresql ·
The RAG client was stealing my connections
google cloud ·
The project quota that killed Shared VPC
ai ·
Five assistants, one loop
nestjs ·
Express 5, Fastify 5, and the adapter I did not swap
ai ·
AGENTS.md, or writing for a reader that forgets
typescript ·
They ported tsc to Go
redis ·
Redis is open source again, and I have stopped keeping score
ai ·
The block images are generated now
ai ·
A tool call is just a schema
kafka ·
ZooKeeper is gone
sdk ·
A batch of ten, a flush timer, and the event that did not fit
messaging ·
One topic, three regions, and the policy that took the longest
databases ·
Aurora DSQL, and the clock doing the hard part
redis ·
A week of alternatives, and the migration I did not make
nestjs ·
NestJS over plain Express
analytics pipeline ·
The tunnel that starts on our side
postgresql ·
Two years later, MERGE grew the clauses I wanted
elasticsearch ·
Elasticsearch came back
embedded analytics ·
The filter you can see is not the one that matters
redis ·
Redis changed its licence, and the fork was already warm
ci/cd ·
Auto-merging a pull request nobody wrote
aws proton ·
Proton opens the pull request. You own everything after it.
lookml ·
Promoting a dashboard is a string replacement
redis ·
Valkey exists now
platform engineering ·
The button in Port and the service it makes
go ·
Go changed a loop, and nothing broke
opentofu ·
The fork shipped
c# / .net ·
.NET 8, Native AOT, and what a container actually costs
automation ·
The snapshot restore was the easy half
queues ·
BullMQ, and the Mongo queue I did not use
migration ·
The cutover was a connection string
terraform ·
The licence changed under the state file
kafka ·
The bridge release arrived
terraform ·
The import block, and the resources nobody wrote down
next.js ·
The App Router went stable. My site did not move.
rust ·
A weekend with Rust, and the index that stopped cloning
typescript ·
TypeScript 5.0 and the decorators that are finally the real ones
go ·
Errors are values. Go 1.20 made them a list.
eventbridge ·
EventBridge Pipes, and the Lambda I deleted
kafka ·
Kafka without ZooKeeper, for new clusters only
c# / .net ·
.NET 7, and the string literal I stopped escaping
postgresql ·
MERGE is not the upsert you already had
self-hosted runners ·
Self-hosted runners, one deployment per product
mongodb ·
MongoDB 6.0, and the change stream that can show you the before
node.js ·
Node 18 shipped fetch and a test runner. I kept one.
terraform ·
Terraform learned to say what it assumed
kubernetes ·
The dockershim went away and my images did not notice
lucene ·
Every string search I did not have to write
c# / performance ·
The Java port we could not make fast enough
ci/cd ·
GitHub Actions over Jenkins
groovy ·
Groovy everywhere, with one large asterisk
python ·
Two hundred lines of PowerShell I could not test
windows / containers ·
Windows containers, Linux containers, and when a small Windows VM wins
pipelines ·
The scheduled job on the Windows agent
spark / hadoop ·
I wrote a Spark job. The stack trace was Hadoop.
spark ·
The cluster went away. The shuffle did not.
jenkins ·
A Windows agent for Jenkins, from bare VM to online
c# / architecture ·
C# without the class hierarchy
retrospective ·
A year of automating a flat
c# / .net ·
.NET 6 makes small services simpler
infrastructure ·
The same stack, written twice
memorydb ·
Redis you are allowed to lose, and Redis you are not
step functions ·
A ten minute wait should not cost you Lambda time
serverless ·
SAM and Serverless Framework, on the same flat
infrastructure ·
The template I wrote and the one AWS ran
serverless ·
EventBridge cannot tell you when the sun sets
.net / containers ·
Running .NET 5 in Linux containers—and measuring its memory
c# / .net ·
C# 9 and .NET 5: less ceremony, useful improvements
alexa ·
A smart home skill is a router and a contract
migration ·
The migration tool that could not phone home
leadership ·
