~/blog

Writing.

Notes on backend engineering, testing, performance, and the occasional thing that has nothing to do with any of that.

// 09 posts

The CLI knew I wasn't human

I installed a developer tool last week and it started talking past me. Not to me. Past me, to the coding agent in my terminal.

ai-agentsobservabilityfield-notes

Aug 31, 20266 min read

What speedrunning Resident Evil 4 taught me about debugging

Splits, resets, routing, and RNG manipulation map onto debugging better than most engineering advice I've read.

debugginggamesprocess

Aug 26, 20263 min read

Making deploys boring

A deploy should be the least interesting part of shipping. Most of what gets in the way is process rather than tooling.

ci-cdautomationdevops

Aug 11, 20263 min read

Four people, twenty-four hours, one API contract

What actually made a hackathon team of four move in parallel was agreeing on the shape of the data before anyone wrote a line of code.

teamworkapishackathon

Jul 27, 20263 min read

I built a search engine before I reached for embeddings

Everyone plugs in a vector database now. Building TF-IDF on Redis sorted sets first taught me what retrieval actually costs and where the ranking comes from.

pythonredissearch

Jul 13, 20263 min read

What teaching kids to code fixed in my own code

Teaching Unity, Scratch, and JavaScript to students who will not accept 'that's just how it works' as an answer.

teachingfundamentalscareer

Jun 30, 20263 min read

Charging someone twice is the easiest bug to ship

Building a billing service taught me that the interesting problems in payments are retries, currency minimums, and staying in sync with a system you don't control.

pythonpaymentsfastapi

Jun 15, 20264 min read

The API tests worth keeping

Most of the cost of an API test suite is not writing the assertions. It is test data, environments, auth, and making a red build explain itself.

testingapisautomation

May 28, 20263 min read

The best performance fix was deleting the smooth scroll

I added a smooth-scroll library because every portfolio seems to have one. Three commits of tuning later, I deleted it in a fourth, and the deletion taught me more than the tuning did.

nextjsperformancefrontend

May 11, 20264 min read