The mask in the README
2026.139An attention mask drawn in ASCII, and the architectural trade it names.
Systems
2026
Vortex architecture
2026.070What Tesla's 3-6-9 has to say about scaling systems -- and the invariants that hold while the rest moves.
The happy path
2026.016The abstractions rotate every few years. The failure modes don't.
2025
Replacing OCR with Gemini
2025.191Trading 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
2025.186How 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
2024.310A regulation arrives. The work looks like encryption at first. It is not.
Circuit breaking in Go
2024.272The 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
2024.172Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind -- and the three problems that make caching hard: stampedes, coordinated expiry, and invalidation.
2021
PostgreSQL HA
2021.074Streaming 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.
2019
The board stayed green
2019.295The board put us ahead of every customer ticket - until it stayed green while the data underneath it went wrong.
2018
Consul in practice
2018.253Service 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
2018.193Transaction pooling, one SET that didn't stick, and a standup that moved on.
The GraphQL buffer
2018.110A 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
2017.074Picking 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
2014.319Adding 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
2012.325Replacing an e-commerce frontend without turning off the old one -- carving over layer by layer while the store takes orders.
Rolling your own search
2012.074Building catalog search with flattened MongoDB documents and application-side scoring when the proper tools don't exist yet.
2010
Counting malloc
2010.318Everything else was tuned. The wall was the one function I never wrote -- malloc. A dtrace one-liner showed the paths in.