The happy path
The abstractions rotate every few years. The failure modes don't.
Writing
2026
Coding with LLMs
The bugs are quieter now. Just wrong assumptions buried in correct-looking code.
2025
autobreaker: adaptive circuit breaking
Why static failure counts break at both ends of the traffic spectrum, and a lock-free Go circuit breaker that uses percentage-based thresholds to adapt automatically.
Replacing OCR with Gemini
Trading a traditional OCR pipeline for Gemini's vision model -- prompt engineering as product specification, multi-factor confidence scoring, and what changes when you treat document processing as understanding rather than extraction.
Fixing OCR addresses
How a cascade of exact, prefix, and fuzzy strategies resolves broken OCR output into valid addresses -- with confidence scoring so downstream systems know what to trust.
McKenna and the architecture of consciousness
What a psychedelic philosopher and a distributed systems engineer have in common -- language as protocol, culture as legacy code, and consciousness as modifiable architecture.
2024
Primary PII
A regulation arrives. The work looks like encryption at first. It is not.
Circuit breaking in Go
The three-state machine that keeps a failing dependency from taking down everything else -- with sony/gobreaker, a custom atomic implementation, and retry composition.
Scout, plan, wait
The legacy codebase runs the business. The migration is on every roadmap. Not this one.
Redis caching patterns
Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind -- and the three problems that make caching hard: stampedes, coordinated expiry, and invalidation.
2023
The first five minutes
The panel is not comparing the diagram to a reference solution. There isn't one.
2022
Building from zero, twice
What it takes to build a remote engineering center -- and what stays the same when you do it again at a tenth of the scale.
2021
Evidence
The debate ended when the PM pulled up a graph.
PostgreSQL HA
Streaming replication, automated failover, and the operational lessons that aren't in the PostgreSQL docs -- split-brain, silent lag, and why DR drills matter more than DR plans.
2020
The crossover
The first migration had a platform on fire. The second has one that works. That is the harder one.
2019
Prescaling for a known spike
Autoscale never helped in the time of crisis. What helped was prescaling -- capacity ready before the traffic arrives.
2018
Consul in practice
Service discovery, health checks, and dynamic config across a growing fleet of microservices -- and the moment KV store got too popular.
The compiler as first reviewer
How a growing team adopted Go -- not through boot camps, but through code review, shadowing, and a compiler that wouldn't let anyone be sloppy.
The week pgbouncer stopped being news
Transaction pooling, one SET that didn't stick, and a standup that moved on.
The GraphQL buffer
A GraphQL gateway that started as a unified API layer for clients became the place where we could intervene without touching the backends.