Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
OAuth is treated as the default for any modern API. For developer tools where the integrator and the operator are the same person, the indirection layer pays back nothing and costs everything.
The schoolroom story of windmills is Don Quixote's tilting-at-them on the plains of La Mancha. The actual story is a thousand-year arc of structural and aerodynamic engineering that quietly solved the same problems we now solve again with carbon fiber and computer modeling.
Blue-green and canary deployments both promise safer rollouts, but they buy different things at different costs. The actual decision is rarely the one the marketing materials describe.
Tom Wilkie's RED method gives you three numbers per service: rate, errors, duration. They are not exciting. They catch most production incidents anyway. The case for the boring metrics that consistently earn their keep.
The well is the oldest piece of civic infrastructure that still works the way it did when it was invented. The Bronze Age innovations that solved problems we have largely forgotten existed, the strange persistence of medieval technology into the present, and the deep-aquifer engineering that qu
Publishing an event after a database transaction commits is a deceptively hard problem. The outbox pattern solves it without distributed transactions, with a small schema change and a worker. The pitfalls, the variations, and the reasons it has become the default for reliable event publishing.
Heartbeats are the simplest distributed-systems primitive most engineers think they understand and most production systems get wrong. The interval-vs-timeout trap, the network-partition problem, the cascading-failure mode, and the patterns that produce honest liveness signals.
Structured logging libraries have proliferated, log management vendors have multiplied, and the industry consensus has drifted toward expensive ingestion pipelines. The case for plain-text-with-discipline as the default for small SaaS, and what it takes to keep the boring format honest.
Webhook payload schemas drift over time, and every drift is a potential break in your customers' integrations. The discipline of versioning, the patterns that minimize churn, and the migration path that respects the asymmetric cost of breaking changes paid by the customer.
Event sourcing replaces the current-state row with the append-only log of changes that produced it. The pattern is powerful where audit, time-travel, and replay are first-class requirements, and structurally wrong where the current state is what the application actually consults a hundred times
Sharding is the answer when a single Postgres instance has run out of vertical room, and it is the wrong answer at almost every other moment. The honest migration path — read-your-writes routing, dual-write phases, and shard-key choice that survives growth — separates the teams that succeed fro
For three thousand years, lighthouses were the highest engineering achievements of their time and the largest civic investment most cities ever made. They were built from stones that had to outlive empires, lit by fuels that had to be invented, and operated by keepers whose isolation produced its...