Notes on systems, craft & engineering culture.
Occasional essays on the things I think about between commits — distributed systems, the economics of abstraction, on-call sanity, and the quiet craft of writing software that lasts.
The cost of a clever abstraction
Every abstraction is a loan against future understanding. Here's how I decide when the interest rate is worth paying.
Backpressure is a feature, not a failure
Why the systems I trust most are the ones that know how to say "not right now" — gracefully, and on purpose.
Writing logs your future self will thank you for
A small set of habits that turn 3 a.m. debugging from archaeology into a quick read.
On-call without the dread: a small playbook
Runbooks, blast radius, and the cultural choices that make being paged feel survivable.
The migration that ran for six months
A long, dull, boringly-successful database migration — and why "boring" was the whole point.
Tests I actually keep
Not all coverage is equal. The handful of test shapes that have earned a permanent place in my projects.
Reading code is the job
We optimize relentlessly for writing code and almost never for reading it. A case for flipping that.