Vortex architecture
What Tesla's 3-6-9 has to say about scaling systems -- and the invariants that hold while the rest moves.
Systems
2026
The happy path
The abstractions rotate every few years. The failure modes don't.
2025
Replacing OCR with Gemini
Trading a traditional OCR pipeline for Gemini's vision model -- prompt engineering as product specification, multi-factor confidence scoring, and what changes when you treat document processing as understanding rather than extraction.
Fixing OCR addresses
How a cascade of exact, prefix, and fuzzy strategies resolves broken OCR output into valid addresses -- with confidence scoring so downstream systems know what to trust.
2024
Primary PII
A regulation arrives. The work looks like encryption at first. It is not.
Circuit breaking in Go
The three-state machine that keeps a failing dependency from taking down everything else -- with sony/gobreaker, a custom atomic implementation, and retry composition.
Redis caching patterns
Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind -- and the three problems that make caching hard: stampedes, coordinated expiry, and invalidation.
2021
PostgreSQL HA
Streaming replication, automated failover, and the operational lessons that aren't in the PostgreSQL docs -- split-brain, silent lag, and why DR drills matter more than DR plans.
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 week pgbouncer stopped being news
Transaction pooling, one SET that didn't stick, and a standup that moved on.
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 first service
Picking the first piece to cut from a Perl monolith, rewriting it in Go, and switching over before you lose your nerve.
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.
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.
Rolling your own search
Building catalog search with flattened MongoDB documents and application-side scoring when the proper tools don't exist yet.