Writing
Things I figured out the hard way
93 articles
career ·
The 10x engineer
AI made all of us faster, so speed alone no longer tells one engineer from another. The engineers who get ten times more out of it knew more to begin with: they mastered their own craft, then learned enough of the professions around it to do that work as well.
ai ·
The agent prefers the monolith
career ·
The three pillars of the modern software product engineer
migration ·
We left Heroku during the World Cup final
access control ·
The lock keeps the hours
payments ·
Unknown is not a decline
ai ·
Opus is back
ai ·
An identity provider in an afternoon
mobile ·
The check-in app is one web page and two wrappers
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
astro ·
The landing pages belong to the designer now
postgresql ·
The RAG client was stealing my connections
google cloud ·
The project quota that killed Shared VPC
ai ·
Five assistants, one loop
ai ·
A harness for the model after this one
react ·
The front-end choice is made, and it is not my favourite
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
solid ·
One week with Solid
platform engineering ·
The button in Port and the service it makes
svelte ·
One week with Svelte
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
vue ·
One week with Vue
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 ·
