Plans, not posts
2014.120Leaving the salary to try building something -- a platform where the unit isn't opinion or memory, but a plan.
Writing
2014
ACCEPTed. COMMITed. RESOLVEd.
2014.101Adrian 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
2014.006A text-poster on a meeting-room wall, doing more work than a poster should.
Node.js on a Raspberry Pi
2014.005Running 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
2013.345A birthday, a public oath, and one line I want to keep.
Thank You, Sachin
2013.322Two days after the speech. I went looking for the numbers.
Sachin at Wankhede
2013.321He carried a list. That's the part that broke me.
Express middleware chains
2013.288Route handlers don't need to be nested callbacks -- Express middleware chains turn them into a flat, readable sequence.
On Phabricator
2013.244Phabricator changed what code review means to me. A note from a few months in.
Zero-downtime deploys
2013.196A bash deploy script and a Node.js process monitor -- SSH, pull, touch a file, the cluster reloads. No CI, no dashboard. The terminal.
Sorting by multiple fields
2013.179A composable predicate function for sorting arrays of objects by multiple fields -- with reverse, primers, and short-circuit evaluation.
Running Node.js in production
2013.149Upstart, clustering, zero-downtime deploys, heartbeat monitoring, and an embedded REPL -- what it takes to keep Node.js running in production in 2013.
MySQL on XFS
2013.101Using bind mounts to move MySQL data, config, and logs to an XFS volume without changing a single MySQL setting.
Node.js style guide
2013.051Our team's Node.js conventions -- error-first callbacks, early returns, callback alignment, and the formatting rules we drilled into every new developer.
History as communication
2013.049Commit history isn't a log of what happened -- it's a narrative you author. Rebase, atomic commits, and the discipline of writing history for the person reading it six months from now.
Just Another Brick in the Wall
2013.047Some days you build the wall. Some days you notice you're in it.
Starting over
2013.036Ditching WordPress for a custom Node.js blog engine powered by libgit2 -- git as the content store, markdown as the writing format, npm for everything else.
2012
Running two systems at once
2012.325Replacing an e-commerce frontend without turning off the old one -- carving over layer by layer while the store takes orders.
The dispatch desk
2012.264A basement, a barcode scanner, and the moment the dispatch desk stopped waiting.
A fifty-line rate limiter
2012.249In-memory rate limiting as Express middleware. No Redis, no external service. Fifty lines, one file.