The config file
Connection pool sizes, retry counts, timeouts, commented-out endpoints -- and the archaeology of values that survived production.
Architecture
tag:
architecture
all tags →2026
The dismissal
Three checks and the developer assumes the fourth is covered. That gap is where the damage hides.
Trust boundaries
Your code already leaves the machine. The agent just gave it another surface.
Vortex architecture
What Tesla's 3-6-9 has to say about scaling systems -- and the invariants that hold while the rest moves.
Repeat yourself
Retries fix distributed systems. Repeating yourself fixes attention asymmetry.
The happy path
The abstractions rotate every few years. The failure modes don't.
2024
Primary PII
A regulation arrives. The work looks like encryption at first. It is not.
Scout, plan, wait
The legacy codebase runs the business. The migration is on every roadmap. Not this 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2012
Running two systems at once
Replacing an e-commerce frontend without turning off the old one -- carving over layer by layer while the store takes orders.