Reading code
2026.058Scanners find what's syntactically wrong. The interesting issues live in assumptions -- and assumptions don't have signatures.
Writing
2026
Repeat yourself
2026.049Retries fix distributed systems. Repeating yourself fixes attention asymmetry.
Hello world, printf
2026.047Every previous layer compressed the work. The newest one lets you skip the understanding.
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.
The happy path
2026.016The abstractions rotate every few years. The failure modes don't.
Coding with LLMs
2026.013The bugs are quieter now. Just wrong assumptions buried in correct-looking code.
2025
autobreaker: adaptive circuit breaking
2025.319Why static failure counts break at both ends of the traffic spectrum, and a lock-free Go circuit breaker that uses percentage-based thresholds to adapt automatically.
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.
McKenna and the architecture of consciousness
2025.174What a psychedelic philosopher and a distributed systems engineer have in common -- language as protocol, culture as legacy code, and consciousness as modifiable architecture.
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.
Scout, plan, wait
2024.233The legacy codebase runs the business. The migration is on every roadmap. Not this one.
Redis caching patterns
2024.172Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind -- and the three problems that make caching hard: stampedes, coordinated expiry, and invalidation.
2023
Earned, not handed down
2023.261The new user service got Go because it fit. A thing built compatible with the old never needs a migration mandate.
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.
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.
2020
The crossover
2020.267The first migration had a platform on fire. The second has one that works. That is the harder one.