I’m MerceMay. I’ve been writing software professionally for about seven years, mostly on backend and infrastructure teams at companies you’ve probably never heard of. These days my day job is building boring, reliable systems in Go and Rust — the kind that quietly move money around or keep a pipeline from exploding at 3 a.m.

Before the career thing I studied computer science at a mid-tier state school, dropped out briefly to work at a small ISP where I learned most of what I know about networking by staring at BGP sessions, then went back and finished the degree because my parents kept asking. The ISP gig turned out to be the most educational year of my life. The debugger lives in the kernel.

What this site is

This is where I post things that don’t fit anywhere else — too long for a Mastodon thread, too niche for a conference talk, too specific for anyone to have written down already.

Most of what you’ll find:

  • Posts are longer things. Usually technical, sometimes with code. I try to actually explain why something worked rather than just posting a snippet.
  • Notes are shorter. TIL-style. A command that surprised me, a flag I’ll forget, a gotcha from an outage.
  • Projects are small open-source things I’ve made. Some are still alive, some I should probably archive on GitHub.
  • Photos is what happens when I leave the apartment. I’m bad at posting consistently but I enjoy looking back.

Why I write

Mostly for future-me. The version of me who will inevitably run into the same DNS caching problem in two years and will google his own blog to remember what he did.

Secondarily, I think the web is better when more people who aren’t professional writers post what they know. The internet I grew up on had more of this and less “8 frameworks you should learn in 2024.” I want to be a small vote toward the old kind.

Projects

I used to host code on various git servers; these days I just mirror my own projects here — see /src/ for the file trees.

I don’t use LinkedIn. I don’t have a Twitter account anymore. I don’t do consulting. Please don’t pitch me anything.

Standard disclaimers

Opinions here are my own, etc. etc. — nothing on this site has been reviewed by any employer, past or present. If I write about specific software, I almost certainly have used it in some capacity, but I’m rarely compensated to say anything about it. The one exception is a Patreon I had briefly in 2023 that I closed when it felt weird.

No tracking on this site. No analytics. No cookies. The server log rotates every 14 days and I don’t look at it.