The war room
The prep runs out ninety minutes in. The rest is improvised on a floor where nobody leaves.
Writing
2018
2017
The same tree, twice
I've built a rules engine twice, in two languages, at two scales. The tree is the same.
Designing a wallet
What a digital wallet looks like underneath -- a balance, a ledger, idempotency keys, and the gap between moving money and moving money correctly.
Hazard lights
We wired physical lights to 5xx alerts. It changed how the team reacts to production issues.
Nginx load balancing decisions
Algorithm selection, passive health checking, per-endpoint rate limiting, and upstream timing -- the decisions that matter when Nginx sits in front of production traffic.
The first service
Picking the first piece to cut from a Perl monolith, rewriting it in Go, and switching over before you lose your nerve.
2016
Switching to Go
Migrating a payment processing API from Node.js to Go -- what changed, what improved, and what we gave up.
2015
Building with one other person
What a codebase looks like when two people build everything -- 350 commits, and a todo list with two items.
Graph queries for a social feed
Why a graph database was the only sane choice for a social feed where the interesting question isn't what your friends posted, but what your friends' friends are doing this Saturday.
2014
Two-sided graph
Adding businesses to a social platform built on Neo4j -- and realizing both sides of the marketplace use the same graph patterns.
The middleware chain
Two people, one Express app, and eight middleware functions between the request and the response.
Git history with Gource
Turning months of git commits into an animated video with Gource and ffmpeg -- then opening the weekly sharing session with it.
Plans, not posts
Leaving the salary to try building something -- a platform where the unit isn't opinion or memory, but a plan.
ACCEPTed. COMMITed. RESOLVEd.
Adrian Hands contributed a GNOME patch using Morse code typed with his knees. His commit message was three words and an exclamation.
Go Big or Go Home
A text-poster on a meeting-room wall, doing more work than a poster should.
Node.js on a Raspberry Pi
Running a custom Node.js blog engine on a Raspberry Pi at home -- from a 45-day wait and a dead board to DuckDNS, ISP port blocking, and the first external request.
2013
11/12/13
A birthday, a public oath, and one line I want to keep.
Thank You, Sachin
Two days after the speech. I went looking for the numbers.
Sachin at Wankhede
He carried a list. That's the part that broke me.
Express middleware chains
Route handlers don't need to be nested callbacks -- Express middleware chains turn them into a flat, readable sequence.