Observability costs more than the thing it observes
At some point your telemetry bill exceeded your compute bill and nobody noticed. Here's how to fix it without going blind.
page 5
older dispatches from the README archive.
Infrastructure as code, ten years of lessons
State files, drift, modules that became frameworks, and the one practice that separates teams that like their IaC from teams that don't.
Rate limiting: the four algorithms and when each is wrong
Token bucket, leaky bucket, fixed window, sliding window. They fail differently and the differences matter.
Node 26 and the build step that finally disappeared
Type stripping, a mature test runner, and a standard library that absorbed the ecosystem. You can ship TypeScript with no toolchain.
The joke RFCs are the best documentation
RFC 1149, RFC 2324, and why the internet's funniest specifications are also its clearest.
Q1 2026, in one page
Regulatory deadlines, a linker change, and a quarter where the interesting news was mostly infrastructure.
The database you should have chosen
Postgres. That's the article. Here's the longer version, including the cases where it's wrong.
Agent fleets in production: a field report
Running many coding agents at once works better than expected on one axis and worse on every other. What actually happens.
Why your build is slow
Six causes, in order of how often they're the actual problem, with the fix for each.
Pattern matching arrives everywhere at once
Java, Python, C#, and JavaScript are all converging on the same feature from ML languages, thirty years late.
The state of self-hosting
Running your own infrastructure got dramatically easier while the industry was arguing about the cloud. A practical assessment.
Design docs people actually read
The average design doc is eleven pages and gets three comments, all on page one. Here's the format that works.
Passkeys mostly won and nobody noticed
Phishing-resistant authentication is now the default on major platforms. The remaining problem is account recovery.
HTTP/3 and QUIC, five years in
It shipped, it works, most of the web uses it, and almost nobody understands what changed. A practical review.
The cost of a meeting, in engineering terms
Not the hourly rate. The fragmentation. Here's why a 30-minute meeting costs four hours.
GTC 2026 and the rack that draws a megawatt
New silicon, new interconnect, and an industry where the unit of purchase is a room rather than a card.
Schema design is the only design that lasts
Your code will be rewritten. Your API will be versioned. Your data model will outlive both and every mistake in it is permanent.
GDC and the engineering nobody outside games learns from
Frame budgets, determinism, and shipping to a fixed target. Game developers solved problems the rest of us are still arguing about.
Feature flags and the state space nobody tests
Twenty flags is a million configurations. You are testing one of them. Here's how to keep that from being a problem.
The engineer's guide to saying no
Refusing work badly is a career problem. Refusing it well is one of the most valuable things a senior engineer does.