We build temples out of paychecks. Altars of leather seats and square footage. We hang diplomas like saints on the wall and call it arrival. The hungry years. The proving. The more, the almost, the finally. We gnaw the hours down to bone for things that will forget our names…
In first grade, Mrs. Cooper's class at Oakview Elementary, she would always play a game with the class similar to hide and seek. A classmate would hide a toy (I believe it was a leprechaun) while the rest of us would put ur heads down and waited. Once…
The origin story nobody asks about but everyone should. 1995? 1994? 1993? 1992? We all have our Eben Visher. My parents family friend, Eben Visher, typed commands into a black screen while I watched like it was sorcery, as he would come over all the time to fix our computers.…
In 2013, at EVALS, I implemented the command bus pattern for the first time quite heavily. We had a modular backend, and using it as a way to coordinate across module boundaries felt cleaner than injecting services or passing DTOs around. It had intent baked in. Action. For the right…
You're an engineer with a Turborepo monorepo, pnpm workspaces, Next.js, Docker Compose with Kubernetes, Helm charts, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Datadog, and whatever landed on AWS this week. You think you're building something sleek. You're building a 40-story skyscraper to serve a lemonade stand.…
I watch Seinfeld. I watch Seinfeld every. single. night. I’ve done this for years. My wife has never seen a single episode of Seinfeld, but she can quote it like clockwork, and fill in the punch lines because she’s heard the entire series 320x times. When I’m…
What if it happens and there's no way out. The not-knowing doesn't kill me. It keeps me too alert to die. Alone is where the walls learn your name. They watch. They wait. They know the game. Then the chest tightens its gri a fist closing…
A narcissist will try to destroy your life with lies before you can destroy theirs with truth Truth will always win, trust me.…
Twenty-five years of backend services. I've shipped MVC, MVVM, full DDD, hexagonal, clean architecture. All of them work. None of them are wrong. But when I start something new, I keep defaulting to the same structure. SOA with a thin application layer and domain modules. Not because it&…