Long-form writing — walkthroughs, deep dives, and the occasional rant.
Close to a decade and dozens of production services in: the project structure, dependency injection rules, test harness, consumers, migrations, auth and monitoring I start every Nest.js project with, plus the skills that let an agent verify its own work.
Terminus, Tailscale, and a NUC in the study. The setup I use to get real work done from a phone, and the two places it stops being pleasant.
Six months of confident, plausible, wrong fixes for the same Postgres incident — and what changed when I stopped asking Claude for a patch and asked it to teach me how to diagnose one.
Valve's Steam Machine landed in Australia at $1,609. I priced a cheaper build, a like-for-like one, and a higher-end one against it — and thanks to the RAM crisis, the usual just-build-one answer isn't the walkover it normally is.
Not the one-plant, two-t-shirts kind of minimalism. A slower version built around a single idea — cost of ownership — and what changed once it clicked: a simpler wardrobe, a quieter desk, a streamlined digital life, and a noticeable weight off.
Most of what people call their values — being active, a big social circle, a good career — are really social idealisms: the life they think they should want. A short take on the distinction John DeMartini draws in The Values Factor, and the test for telling the two apart.
Owning a mistake looks like it should cost you standing. Done consistently and meant, it does the opposite — here's the outage that taught me why, and the mechanism underneath it.
Most people who call themselves brutally honest just can't read the room. Being direct when you can read it — and saying the true thing anyway — is a different trade, and the bill comes due differently at work than at home.
A short random prefix plus a throwaway slug gives you URLs that survive title changes — no UUID ugliness, no slug-history table. Plus why the collision-retry loop matters more than the keyspace suggests.
How posts and notes here actually get made — AI-assisted, with a structured pass that flags speculation rather than laundering it as fact.
Two years on from the 2024 list. The shipping-code part has changed completely; most of the rest looks the same — and where it doesn't, the reasons are worth knowing.
For a couple of years I was sure that renting and tipping the difference into index funds beat buying. Then I bought a smaller, older house on a worse street — and worked out what the spreadsheet had been missing about leverage and tax.
When parallelising N small queries looks like a fix and is really just self-DoS at a slightly higher concurrency level.
Why I write repository methods that take arrays and return Maps, even when the only caller — today — is asking for one thing.
How pushing dataloader up to the HTTP controller — out of the resolver layer it usually lives in — cut downstream database load by 83% on a read-heavy endpoint.
Where the JavaScript game-engine landscape has gaps, and how I'd fill them if I built one.
What two years of running a production GraphQL service taught me about where it earns its keep and where it doesn't.