The deploy is the cache
2026.197Presigned URLs cap at seven days -- a protocol ceiling. A static site mints URLs at build and serves them until the next deploy. The clock starts at mint.
Systems
2026
Specs replace code? Not until specs stop lying
2026.184The spec says what should happen. Code says what does. Only one of them actually runs.
The protocol nobody asked for
2026.183Every team eventually builds a retry mechanism. They all build it during an incident. None of them write the spec first.
The abstraction that lied
2026.181Method names encode intent, not contract. The gap is structural, and the fix is not better names.
Shortage of shared fields
2026.179Hiring isn't broken. It was never designed. Two sides fill different forms with different fields, and the join fails before the conversation starts.
Verification Theater
2026.176The deploy broke. The checks were green. The mechanism measures what it can see - and what it can't see is everything that breaks.
What the error message isn't telling you
2026.167connection refused is not a diagnosis. It's a location marker. The error is telling you where the failure surfaced, not where it started.
The silent assumption in the default
2026.146The config said workers: 4. The machines had 32 cores. The number had been there since 2017. Nobody chose it. Nobody knew why.
The mask in the README
2026.139An attention mask drawn in ASCII, and the architectural trade it names.
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
2025.191Prompt engineering as product specification, confidence as contract -- what changes when document processing becomes understanding, not 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.
Learning Postgres under fire
2019.258The index was there. The query was right. Postgres stopped using it anyway.
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.