Posts
Things I’ve written that are long enough to deserve an introduction. Mostly backend engineering, occasional detour into photography and espresso machines.
-
nix-shell for reproducing bugs from five years ago
A small, practical use of Nix that doesn't require buying into the ecosystem.
-
CI dependency graph for a monorepo that doesn't run everything
The core trick that cut our PR CI time from 22 minutes to 4 on average.
-
The fzf shell setup that finally stuck
I kept installing fzf and forgetting about it. Here is the config that put it in my muscle memory.
-
git worktree as a daily driver, not a party trick
Three years in, I can't imagine switching branches the old way.
-
We tried buildpacks. I don't recommend them for most teams.
A six-month experience report. The value proposition is real; the downsides are too.
-
Justfile patterns for a crowded monorepo
How we keep our task runner tidy when every service wants its own rituals.
-
SLO math for tired engineers
Enough formulas to write real alerts without spending a weekend in a textbook.
-
Structured logging lessons from four years of zerolog
Structured logging is not the hard part. The hard part is everything around it.
-
Head vs tail sampling: the mental model I wish I'd had
I conflated these for years. Here is a cleaner way to think about them.
-
A Heisenbug in a Go channel close that took me two weeks
The bug went away when I added logging. I know. Here is what was going on.
-
Tuning pgvector HNSW without giving up
Defaults are fine for toys. Here is what I changed to make pgvector work on a real dataset.
-
strace revealed our libc mismatch
A service worked on one image and not another. The difference was invisible until we traced syscalls.
-
Debugging a remote core dump without losing your mind
A core dump from production is a gift. Here is how I unwrap it.
-
A workflow for flaky tests that doesn't involve retry-until-green
We stopped rerunning flakes and started investigating them. Our suite is healthier and faster for it.
-
Dev containers at 30 engineers: the unglamorous middle
Dev containers solve real problems but have their own operational tail.