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.…
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&…
ACL. ACL. ACL. You might be using this pattern right now. Following it. Borrowing from it and you have no idea it has a name. At NinjaCat, one of the first tasks handed to me when I joined, was making our MongoDB data warehouse more reliable and scalable. I did…
In 2012, I co-founded a company (https://EVALS.NET) that built a SaaS product out of my basement in California (yes, a basement in California—I know, rare). It started with an idea, a friend dropping by, and a prototype that barely held together. That friend made three phone calls…
Whether you're in C#, Python, Java, PHP, TypeScript, or Ruby, somewhere in your codebase there's a dictionary getting passed around like a mystery grab bag at a white elephant party. "Here's some stuff. Figure it out." Look familiar? public void ProcessUser(IDictionary&…
You're rejecting candidates because they didn't reverse a binary tree in 12 minutes. On a whiteboard. While someone watched. That's not evaluation. That's a hazing ritual with a MacBook. You want to know if someone can build your CRUD app. So you…
In my career, I've had the pleasure of working with and consulting with a lot of companies. As I'm sure we can all relate, there's a demand to improve productivity. As one digs deeper, I quite often encounter a lack of accountability, which stems…
In software engineering, there's always a moment where the community erupts over some new framework or technology. Sometimes it's genuinely new. Sometimes it's just something old that got rediscovered and paraded around like a returning messiah. 2009, enter Ruby on Rails for me. I…