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…
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.…
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 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.…
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…