How to run a spike
Timeboxed investigation is the cheapest way to buy certainty, and most teams do it in a way that produces neither certainty nor code.
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older dispatches from the README archive.
Boring technology, revisited
The innovation-token argument is a decade old and still right, with one amendment nobody makes.
The service you should not have written
A checklist for the moment before you create a new deployable, when saying no is still free.
Reading a flame graph
The single most useful performance visualisation, and the four shapes worth recognising in one.
What "done" actually means
Every team has a definition of done and most of them are a checklist nobody reads. Here is the version that changes behaviour.
Go 1.27 and the six-month metronome
Go ships every February and August, has done for a decade, and the predictability is worth more than any feature in it.
The load-bearing comment
Most comments restate the code and rot. A few carry information the code cannot express, and those are worth defending.
Two hundred pieces in
What writing in public taught me about engineering, what I was most wrong about, and why the archive is the point.
The AI Act's high-risk obligations take effect today
Two years after entry into force, the substantive requirements arrive. What changes, what was delayed, and what to do now.
Two years of agentic coding: what stuck
The workflows that survived contact with real work, the ones that did not, and what the whole thing actually changed.
Deleting code is the highest-value work nobody schedules
Every line you remove is one that cannot break, cannot be misread, and does not need to be maintained.
The performance budget
A number, agreed in advance, that fails the build. The only mechanism that has ever kept a system fast.
What I look for in a codebase in the first hour
A checklist for assessing an unfamiliar codebase quickly — for a job, a due diligence, or a project you inherited.
The unreasonable effectiveness of a changelog
A file that takes ten minutes per release and answers most of the questions your users would otherwise ask you.
Property-based testing deserves its moment
State an invariant, let the machine find the counterexample. A twenty-year-old technique that fits this moment exactly.
Vendor lock-in: an honest cost model
Portability is not free and neither is dependence. A framework for deciding how much abstraction to buy.
Connection pooling, explained properly
Why your database has 400 connections, why that is bad, and how to size a pool without guessing.
The onboarding document that actually works
Most onboarding docs are written by people who already know. Here is what a new engineer needs on day one, in order.
Why your container image is 1.4 gigabytes
It should be forty megabytes. Here is where the rest of it came from and how to get it back.
Secrets management, practically
Not a survey of vaults. The specific practices that actually reduce risk, in order of what to do first.