Hello world, printf
2026.047Every previous layer compressed the work. The newest one lets you skip the understanding.
Craft
2026
The senior who stopped coding
2026.020Pattern recognition lives in the practice. The flinch that catches the N+1 query doesn't survive a full calendar.
Coding with LLMs
2026.013The bugs are quieter now. Just wrong assumptions buried in correct-looking code.
2024
Scout, plan, wait
2024.233The legacy codebase runs the business. The migration is on every roadmap. Not this one.
2023
The first five minutes
2023.030The panel is not comparing the diagram to a reference solution. There isn't one.
2022
Building from zero, twice
2022.227What it takes to build a remote engineering center -- and what stays the same when you do it again at a tenth of the scale.
2021
Evidence
2021.253The debate ended when the PM pulled up a graph.
2020
The crossover
2020.267The first migration had a platform on fire. The second has one that works. That is the harder one.
2018
The war room
2018.041The prep runs out ninety minutes in. The rest is improvised on a floor where nobody leaves.
2015
Building with one other person
2015.084What a codebase looks like when two people build everything -- 350 commits, and a todo list with two items.
2014
Git history with Gource
2014.158Turning months of git commits into an animated video with Gource and ffmpeg -- then opening the weekly sharing session with it.
Plans, not posts
2014.120Leaving the salary to try building something -- a platform where the unit isn't opinion or memory, but a plan.
2013
On Phabricator
2013.244Phabricator changed what code review means to me. A note from a few months in.
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.
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
The dispatch desk
2012.264A basement, a barcode scanner, and the moment the dispatch desk stopped waiting.
2011
The catch that never fired
2011.317Reading the parent frame's URL throws in Firefox and returns undefined in WebKit. The defensive catch I wrote never fired.
2010
The screen I couldn't read
2010.311The options chain lit up — green for up, red for down. I wrote the code that put the numbers there. The screen was never for me.
Clean designs
2010.301The training gave me syntax. My first manager gave me taste.