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Browse this website posts across architecture, delivery, product systems, and the public writing footprint connected to this site.
Zero-downtime deploys on a cheap VPS
Field notes
485 published articles. Essays written here open in place; older tutorials take you back to the site where they first appeared.
These aren't rare. They're the same seven patterns, documented in breach reports, CVE databases, and botnet postmortems, showing up on new self-hosted boxes on a loop — because the defaults that make setup fast are the same defaults that make a box exploitable.
CareerAn empirical study of real software projects found the top cause of requirements change wasn't a confused client — it was the client understanding their own problem better once they saw something built. That reframes what to do about it.
Web DevChoosing between REST, GraphQL, and tRPC isn't about picking the "best" — it's about matching your architecture to your constraints. Here's what each excels at.
Cloud / DevOpsThese aren't rare. They're the same seven patterns, documented in breach reports, CVE databases, and botnet postmortems, showing up on new self-hosted boxes on a loop — because the defaults that make setup fast are the same defaults that make a box exploitable.
Web DevSession cookies, JWT, OAuth, magic links, passkeys — none of them is the correct answer by default. Here's what actually breaks with each one: revocation, XSS exposure, provider downtime, device loss.
CareerA slide deck lets you skip the hard part. A design doc does not. Amazon banned PowerPoint from its S-Team meetings for exactly that reason, and a 1989 economics experiment explains why the skill you actually need is rarer than it looks.
Web DevStartups face a critical database choice: PostgreSQL for relational data, MongoDB for documents, or both. Learn the real trade-offs and a framework to decide.
ArticleDirect comparison of Vapi, Retell AI, and Bland AI: pricing, latency, integrations, and when to choose each platform for your voice AI projects.
Web DevMaster TypeScript patterns that catch bugs at compile time. Discriminated unions, branded types, and exhaustiveness checks prevent the production failures that slip past runtime testing.
CareerThe Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that a NASA engineering team's own warning about wing damage was buried in a bulleted PowerPoint slide so dense that a senior manager could read it and miss the life-threatening finding entirely.
Web DevReact 19's Compiler auto-memoizes your components, so useMemo and useCallback stop being the first line of defense. Add Actions and ref-as-prop, and a chunk of your architecture just gets simpler.
Web DevShared-schema, schema-per-tenant, or database-per-tenant: the isolation model you pick early is the one you're stuck maintaining. Here's how to choose, and what breaks if you choose wrong.
CareerThe IRS has a three-factor legal test for this distinction, and it has nothing to do with which word sounds more impressive on an invoice. Most engineers who call themselves 'consultants' are, by that test and by function, contractors.
CareerA well-known pattern in technical support has a name: the XY problem, where someone asks for help with their attempted solution instead of their actual problem. A client dictating implementation is usually running this exact pattern, just with a bigger budget attached.
Web DevAI-native products need custom accessibility frameworks. This checklist bridges WCAG requirements with the real-time, autonomous nature of AI interfaces—ensuring your product is powerful and accessible to all users.
CareerMost technical proposals over-explain the implementation and under-explain the boundary. The IEEE's own requirements-engineering standard drew that exact line decades ago — what a system must do, kept separate from how it will do it — and most proposals ignore it.
Web DevExplore the trade-offs between monorepo and polyrepo architectures as your engineering team scales, with practical decision frameworks.
CareerA 1985 study found theater-goers who'd paid more for their season tickets kept attending plays they didn't enjoy, just to avoid feeling like the money was wasted. The same bias is why engineers keep bad clients long after the math stopped working.
Web DevPWAs have matured significantly. iOS support is better, but native apps still win on certain features. Here's what changed and when PWAs make sense.
Web DevWebSockets, SSE, and long polling each solve different problems. Choose wrong and you waste infrastructure. We break down the tradeoffs with concrete decision points.
ArticleLLMO is partly real optimization practice, partly marketing. Here's what actually improves how LLMs understand and retrieve your content—and where the terminology breaks down.
Cloud / DevOpsServerless teams overspend by 30-50%. Here's how to audit your Lambda, API Gateway, and NAT costs, find the leaks, and cut your bill.
CareerCal Newport's 'craftsman mindset' argument says the passion-first advice for building a reputation has the causality backwards. Kevin Kelly's '1000 True Fans' essay adds the scale: you need thousands of people who trust you, not millions who've heard of you.
CareerGoogle dedicated an entire chapter of its own engineering practices book to knowledge sharing, not as a nice-to-have but as infrastructure. The career case for writing it yourself is less about the company and more about what survives you leaving.
Cloud / DevOpsCutting through the noise: a practical guide to building observability for small teams. When to use managed tools like Datadog, when to self-host, and how to avoid alert fatigue.
CareerIn a 1990 Stanford study, listeners correctly named a tapped-out tune 2.5% of the time. The people tapping it out predicted 50%. The gap between those two numbers is the entire reason most technical explanations fail.
Cloud / DevOpsEvent-driven architecture solves real problems. Most startups adopt it to solve problems they don't have yet — here's how to tell which camp you're in.
Cloud / DevOpsThree approaches to IaC dominate in 2026: Terraform's declarative maturity, Pulumi's imperative flexibility, and AWS CDK's cloud-native synthesis. Which fits your infrastructure?
Cloud / DevOpsMaster batching, backpressure, and partitioning strategies to build data pipelines that scale reliably from millions to hundreds of millions of events per day.
Cloud / DevOpsGPU scheduling, cold starts, and autoscaling break serverless assumptions. Learn when Kubernetes is mandatory for AI—and when it's overkill.
Cloud / DevOpsYour cloud bill doesn't have to be a surprise. A practical checklist to find waste, set guardrails, and understand what you're actually paying for.
A working notebook
“Some ideas belong here because they connect directly to projects and services.
Older tutorials still live on Medium, where people first found them. This page keeps the trail intact without pretending everything was published in one place.
How I choose a topic
I would rather publish one useful explanation from lived work than five summaries of things everyone already knows.
Step 01
A topic usually starts as the second or third time the same engineering, product, hiring, or research question lands on my desk.
Step 02
I look for a shipped system, a measured result, a failed approach, or a public artifact that keeps the argument honest.
Step 03
Most technical choices touch something else. The useful links are the ones that help a reader follow that chain without opening fifteen tabs.
Step 04
Some pieces belong on this site; others already have a life elsewhere. I keep the original destination and publishing history intact.
Topics covered
The recurring technical and strategic themes represented across this archive.
A quick orientation
The practical details behind this mixed archive.
Those pieces were published there first. I would rather send you to the original article—with its date, responses, and history—than create a duplicate here.
Thirty-five posts are enough to become noisy. The filters separate original essays from outside tutorials, and permanent page links make it easier to pick up where you left off.
Usually. The essays here tend to connect a technical decision to the project, service, or research context behind it. External posts are often narrower, practical guides.
Please do. Real questions are where the best pieces start. Send the context, what you have already tried, and the part that still feels unclear.
Next step
You do not need a polished brief. A bottleneck, an uncertain architecture decision, or a product idea that refuses to become concrete is enough to start.