Writing
Thoughts on software architecture, engineering leadership, and the occasional rant about abstractions.
2025
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Being Seen in the Fluorescent Fog
A long, spiraling essay about perception, misperception, and the quiet horror of being misunderstood at work, with a few useful truths buried inside.
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Two Beasts, One Language: The Ontology and Obsession of PostgreSQL and MySQL
A deep, reflective exploration of how PostgreSQL and MySQL, though united by SQL, embody radically different philosophies of data, time, and integrity—revealing that every schema is a choice, every query a confession, and every index a window into the database's soul.
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The Engineer as a Perpetual Learner - Why learning is the job and how to build a system that keeps you becoming
A reflection on how AI is transforming software engineering by handling routine tasks, allowing developers to focus on higher-level system thinking and architectural decisions.
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Human Connections and Career Advancement: A Deep Dive
An obsessively detailed examination of the recursive anxieties, bureaucratic storytelling, and faintly sacred possibilities of professional advancement in late-stage capitalism, with footnotes.
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The Distributed Mind: Reliability, Cognition, and the Philosophy of Log-Driven Systems
Explore the obsessive, late-night cognitive experience of engineers transitioning from fragile monolithic databases to resilient distributed systems. This DFW-inspired narrative follows a single transaction through Kafka, Flink, Redis, and Elasticsearch, highlighting probabilistic correctness, eventual consistency, and human patience in modern software architecture.
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You're Not Being Replaced by AI. You're Being Freed to Think Again
A reflection on how AI is transforming software engineering by handling routine tasks, allowing developers to focus on higher-level system thinking and architectural decisions.
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It's always a people problem - Why Code Is Never the Real Problem
A deep dive into why technical excellence alone isn't enough in software engineering, and how understanding human problems is the key to building systems that last. Explores the journey from code-focused engineer to system-thinking architect.
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Dunning-Kruger Driven Development
The inevitable result of an industry where "it works" gets conflated with "it will last," or worse, "it is safe."
2024
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How I was laid off and got six job offers in a month
My story of how I was laid off and got six new job offers in a month.
2023
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The Secret to Building Long-Lasting Software Systems
Passing knowledge through time in software engineering is a necessary skill that can be achieved through methods such as documentation, code best practices, linters, and project management software, to build robust and scalable software systems.
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How to get a better DEV job as a developing country developer
Tips on how to get a better DEV job as a developing country developer, avoiding the common pitfalls and mistakes that most developers make when applying for jobs.