I've never had a good answer for "why I'm in software engineering." It's like asking why breathing is awesome. In 1994 I found Geocities, Perl and Javascript. These combined, was a dopamine hit of instant creation. I built for fun. Then for…
We built a global infrastructure on the assumption that some guy in Oakland would keep paying for his domain registration. Remember when an npm package broke the internet with a single deploy? I do. FORK. YOUR, DEPENDENCIES. VENDOR. THEM. VERSION LOCK THEM. Yes, it feels paranoid but know what else…
My first introduction to IAC was Ansible in about 2015. Writing playbooks instead of SSHing into boxes and running commands like some kind of digital archaeologist. Suddenly infrastructure was repeatable which alone felt like magic. Then Terraform. YAML with remote state in S3 for version control was next for me.…
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&…