Unscalable
I burned a quarter fighting code and a company that weren't designed to scale.
World Without Eng
I like writing about software engineering and startups, theology, and getting paged less often.
Five More Years Until I Can Automate My Job
AI is coming for my job as a Site Reliability Engineer. Too bad it can't take it yet.
What Does it Mean to 'Turn the Other Cheek'?
Jesus isn't asking us to lay down and die. He's giving us a new way of life that disarms evil with good.
(Message) Order out of Chaos: Part 2 of 3
Async message ordering is hard. Here's how to build services that don't rely on any particular order and still do the right thing.
A Worldwide Family: Easter 2025
Easter is the fulfillment of God's promise to bless all the families of the earth, starting with one family in particular.
Migrating off Terraform Cloud
Why I moved to the bare-bones S3 backend, and how to do it correctly if you're using the cloud block in your Terraform config
Event-Driven Dumpsterfire: Part 1 of 3
I've helped multiple companies mess up their event-driven architecture, and it's starting to make sense why
Can you really scale with any language?
Let's look past the LinkedIn hot takes to make real progress on this question.
Common JS bugs are eminently avoidable in Rust
How an undefined error and a broken return in Node would be prevented by design in Rust
When should I AB test?
What an AB test is, why you'd use it, and when it might not be worth it to run a test.
So you want to write an SLO
Here's how to approach writing and enforcing a service-level objective.
How I build a Rust backend service
Here's everything I've learned since the start of 2021 about building backend services in Rust
Ownership and on-call
To figure out who's responsible for on-call, figure out who owns the service
Make your Rust code unit testable with dependency inversion
Use Traits to invert your Rust dependencies and keep your code loosely-coupled and testable.
How to use ephemeral teams responsibly
Ephemeral teams are powerful tools. Here's how to use them for good.
The Mini-Monorepo
Maximize code reuse while protecting your domain boundaries with one owning team, one domain, one set of core business entities and rules, and multiple independently deployable components.
I saved 87% on compute costs by switching languages
Efficient CPU usage is the key to getting the most out of your dollar.
Why you should consider building static sites
Benefit customers, the business, and yourself by building static sites.
End to end testing your Rust service
A lightweight, simple approach to end to end tests for your Rust service using cargo test.
The beauty of a Rust message processor
Rust lends itself well to message processing, whether it be from SQS or other queues, or Kafka.
When to use SSR instead of static
Static sites are great for performance and reliability, but in some situations, SSR may actually be more performant.
Learning from a web app scalability nightmare
What to do when your web app can't handle the load.
Intro to Terraform providers
With Terraform, you can interact with any cloud or SaaS provider as long as there's a provider for it.
How to provision Datadog resources with Terraform
Use Terraform to treat your Datadog observability setup as code! Easily provision, modify, and share monitors across services.