Fail Fast, Succeed Faster

It was a late night in 2012, phone blowing up with texts. "The wheels have come off the wagon!" My business partner was losing it while I was at the gym. Rushed home, jumped on the computer, and found the problem. I had configured an AWS LoadBalancer wrong.…

Navigating CAP Theorem: An Analogy for Nerds

The number of times someone has mentioned CAP Theorem to me unprompted? I can count them on one finger. One. In 25+ years. Six years ago. Story time. It was an interview candidate. They brought it up and I nearly knocked my Liquid Death over. We talked about it for…

Event Hell Is Just Your Login Method

Event systems are something powerful. Whether you're in a microservice, a monolith, or an ACL layer, they make scalability and maintainability actually possible. "After a user logs in, I want to send them a survey!" "Just add it to the code after the login happens.…

Bo Knows Laravel

It's 2011, and over the last four months I've migrated away from Ruby on Rails and back into the PHP MVC framework realm. My last excursion with any PHP MVC framework was based on CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and Symfony, of which I had a combined six years…