Writing
Two kinds of piece. Deep dives that take one thing apart properly, and shorter essays on building software alone. No hype, and nothing claimed that isn't sourced or lived.
Infrastructure
Why Your Docker Image Is 2GB
Your application is a few megabytes. Almost everything else in there is the workshop you built it in, shipped by accident.
Issue #20 · August 5, 2026 · 6 min read
Business
Nobody Cares What You Built. They Care What Broke.
Every case study on every site describes a project that went well. A signal everyone can send is not a signal.
Issue #19 · July 9, 2026 · 6 min read
Databases
Why Your Report Is Off by One Day
A moment in time and a date on a calendar are different things, and every timestamp bug you have ever had lives in the gap between them.
Issue #18 · June 12, 2026 · 7 min read
AI
Why Your AI Output Is Mediocre, and It Is Not the Prompt
Stop prompting. Start briefing. The gap is almost never phrasing, and rewriting the request cannot close it.
Issue #17 · May 16, 2026 · 5 min read
Distributed Systems
Why Your Server Falls Over Before the CPU Is Full
Utilisation does not predict latency. Queueing does, and the curve between them is a cliff you cannot see from a dashboard.
Issue #16 · April 19, 2026 · 8 min read
Databases
I Built a Mini Search Engine for an Internal Product. The Algorithm Was the Easy Part.
Search inside your own product looks like a solved problem until the table gets big. What decided whether it scaled was the shape of the data underneath it.
Issue #15 · March 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Databases
Why Your Inserts Got Slower After You Switched to UUIDs
Nothing about the rows changed. Only the order the keys arrive in, and that turns out to decide almost everything.
Issue #14 · February 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Distributed Systems
The Retry That Took Down the System
Retries are load multiplication that switches itself on at the exact moment you have no headroom left.
Issue #13 · January 28, 2026 · 8 min read
Business
The Client You Should Turn Down
Every bad engagement announced itself before anyone signed anything. The signals are boring, early, and easy to talk yourself out of.
Issue #12 · January 1, 2026 · 6 min read
Distributed Systems
Why Your Customer Got Charged Twice
A timeout tells you nothing about whether the work happened. Everything else follows from that one gap in what the network can report.
Issue #11 · December 5, 2025 · 6 min read
AI
Why Your AI Gives Confident Wrong Answers About Your Own Documents
The model is not making things up. It answered correctly from the three paragraphs it was handed, and nothing checked whether those were the right three.
Issue #10 · November 9, 2025 · 7 min read
Learning
Why Smart People Take Fewer Notes
Writing more down feels like understanding more. It is usually the opposite, and the reason is uncomfortable.
Issue #9 · October 13, 2025 · 5 min read
Learning
Why You Forget Everything You Read (And How to Fix It)
Your memory is not weak. You have been storing facts when your brain only ever wanted connections.
Issue #8 · September 16, 2025 · 14 min read
Workflow
I Stopped Losing Ideas After I Combined Claude With Obsidian
Capture was solved a decade ago. Getting anything back out never was, and that is the half nobody built.
Issue #7 · August 20, 2025 · 6 min read
Fundamentals
Why is 0.1 + 0.2 not 0.3?
One tenth is a repeating fraction in binary, in exactly the way one third is in decimal. Everything else follows from that.
Issue #6 · July 24, 2025 · 12 min read
Databases
Why is my database query slow?
An index is an ordering, not a speed setting. Once you see that, most confusing database behaviour stops being confusing.
Issue #5 · June 27, 2025 · 13 min read
Building
Ship the ugly version
The version you are embarrassed by is the only one that teaches you anything.
Issue #4 · May 31, 2025 · 6 min read
Business
One customer is enough to start
You do not need a market. You need one person with a problem and a budget.
Issue #3 · May 4, 2025 · 6 min read
Craft
Your stack is not the bottleneck
Nobody has ever cancelled a contract because you picked the wrong ORM.
Issue #2 · April 7, 2025 · 5 min read
AI
What AI actually changed in my week
Less hype, more logs. Here is where it earns its keep, and where it does not.
Issue #1 · March 11, 2025 · 6 min read