Essays from the desk.
Fifteen years of engineering condensed into weekly essays on leadership, architecture, delivery, and the occasional homelab rabbit hole.
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The portfolio is the proof. Ship your work or it did not happen.
Not resumes. Not endorsements. Not interview performance. The code you ship, the systems you build, the writing you publish. Ship it or it did not happen.
- /career
- /engineering-leadership
- /architecture
- /experience
2026
15 posts- April 5, 2026 4 min
What I got wrong in my first year as Head of Engineering and what I would do differently
Over-hiring before culture. Saying yes to everything. Underinvesting in developer experience. Staying hands-on too long. The common thread was not trusting the team.
- /engineering-leadership
- /career
- /decision-making
- /team-building
- /experience
- March 29, 2026 5 min
The Cloudflare container platform changes what I would self-host
Edge containers win for stateless batch jobs and lightweight APIs. Self-hosting still wins for stateful services and observability. The line is shifting faster than expected.
- /cloudflare
- /self-hosting
- /homelab
- /architecture
- /learning
- March 22, 2026 5 min
Why every fintech startup eventually builds its own ledger
FinanceOps started with a third-party ledger. Within 18 months we built our own. Ledger semantics are too coupled to business rules for abstraction.
- /fintech
- /financeops
- /architecture
- /postgres
- /blog
- March 15, 2026 5 min
The real job of a Head of Engineering
Make throughput predictable and quality sustainable. Not hero-shipping. Not writing the most code. Build a system that delivers without depending on any single person.
- /engineering-leadership
- /career
- /decision-making
- /cross-functional
- /blog
- March 10, 2026 5 min
Architecture debt is usually a decision-quality problem first
The worst architecture debt comes from low-quality decisions made with plenty of time. Improving decision quality reduces debt faster than refactoring sprints.
- /architecture
- /engineering-leadership
- /decision-making
- /blog
- March 5, 2026 5 min
Engineering teams do not need more process. They need better defaults.
Every incident triggers a new process proposal. The real fix is better CI pipelines, better templates, and better linters. Better defaults scale. More process does not.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /ci-cd
- /decision-making
- /blog
- March 1, 2026 5 min
How I evaluate build-versus-buy decisions at a 50-person startup
Build-versus-buy is not about cost. It is about where your team's attention goes. Build what differentiates. Buy the commodity.
- /engineering-leadership
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /startup-life
- /blog
- February 28, 2026 4 min
What AI changes about engineering leadership
Code review matters more than code writing. Architectural taste matters more than implementation speed. Evaluating AI-generated code is the new critical skill.
- /ai-ml
- /engineering-leadership
- /hiring
- /decision-making
- /blog
- February 20, 2026 4 min
Startup speed and enterprise readiness are not opposites
Audit logging, RBAC, and proper error handling actually accelerate delivery by eliminating rework. Enterprise readiness is a speed multiplier, not a speed tax.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /blog
- February 9, 2026 4 min
Opus 4.6 has a million-token context window and I am still not sure what to do with it
Feeding entire codebases into a single prompt for architecture review produced mixed results. The practical sweet spots are narrower than the capability suggests.
- /ai-ml
- /engineering-leadership
- /decision-making
- /learning
- February 2, 2026 5 min
Drizzle ORM crossed 32K stars and I still think ORM choice barely matters
Query patterns, migration discipline, and connection pooling matter far more than which ORM you choose. The ORM was never the bottleneck.
- /postgres
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /blog
- January 26, 2026 4 min
Why I run my portfolio site on the same stack I use at work
Next.js, Payload CMS, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare. Not laziness. Every problem solved on the portfolio feeds back into production expertise.
- /architecture
- /typescript
- /react
- /postgres
- /career
- January 19, 2026 4 min
Cross-functional alignment is not a meeting problem. It is an incentive problem.
Restructuring OKRs so engineering, product, and sales shared a single top-line metric per quarter fixed what years of alignment meetings could not.
- /engineering-leadership
- /cross-functional
- /startup-life
- /blog
- January 12, 2026 5 min
The homelab Loki stack that monitors my production alerts
A Grafana/Loki/Tempo stack on homelab k3s aggregates logs from personal projects and FinanceOps production alerting. A personal observability stack makes you a better leader.
- /homelab
- /observability
- /self-hosting
- /cloudflare
- /blog
- January 5, 2026 5 min
The hardest conversation I had in 2025 was firing a senior engineer I had hired
He interviewed brilliantly but could not operate in a startup. Performance management is the most important and least taught leadership skill.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /hiring
- /decision-making
- /experience
2025
49 posts- December 22, 2025 5 min
Building a fintech reconciliation engine that handles ten million transactions a day
PostgreSQL partitioned tables, Node.js worker pools, idempotent batch processing, and a custom diffing algorithm. Sub-minute reconciliation at ten million daily transactions.
- /fintech
- /financeops
- /postgres
- /architecture
- /node
- December 15, 2025 4 min
How I budget engineering time and why I give 20 percent to platform work non-negotiably
Twenty percent of every sprint goes to platform work. The compounding cost of deferring platform investment is measurable in incident frequency and developer velocity.
- /engineering-leadership
- /decision-making
- /startup-life
- /blog
- December 8, 2025 5 min
S3 Vectors at re:Invent made me reconsider our entire RAG architecture
2 billion vectors per index at 90% cost reduction. Our pgvector pipeline still makes sense, but the calculus for startups without millisecond latency needs is changing.
- /aws
- /ai-ml
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /learning
- December 1, 2025 5 min
Opus 4.5 is the first AI model I trust to refactor production code unsupervised
Claude Opus 4.5 refactored a 500-line TypeScript module, maintained all tests, and passed review without modification. The bottleneck has shifted from writing to reviewing.
- /ai-ml
- /engineering-leadership
- /typescript
- /blog
- November 24, 2025 4 min
When your SLOs and your sales team disagree, the SLOs lose
An enterprise prospect required 99.99% uptime. Our SLOs were 99.9%. Engineering leaders who refuse to engage with commercial reality get bypassed.
- /engineering-leadership
- /cross-functional
- /financeops
- /observability
- /blog
- November 17, 2025 4 min
Fifteen years of writing code and I still mass-delete my first draft
The first draft reveals the problem's shape. The second draft solves it. Engineers who try to write perfect code on the first pass are optimizing for the wrong thing.
- /career
- /engineering-leadership
- /architecture
- /experience
- November 10, 2025 5 min
The Prisma-to-Drizzle migration we almost did and why we stayed on Prisma
We built a prototype, benchmarked it, and stayed on Prisma because the migration cost exceeded the performance gain for our actual query patterns.
- /postgres
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /learning
- November 3, 2025 4 min
Why your engineering strategy document is probably a wish list, not a strategy
A strategy is a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions. Everything else is a roadmap pretending to be a strategy.
- /engineering-leadership
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /blog
- October 27, 2025 4 min
ArgoCD taught me that GitOps is about audit trails, not about git
After running ArgoCD in homelab and production for over a year, the real value is not deployment automation. It is the complete, immutable audit trail.
- /argocd
- /kubernetes
- /self-hosting
- /homelab
- /blog
- October 20, 2025 4 min
I mass-deleted our internal wiki and started over. Twice.
The wiki grew to 400 pages that nobody read. The fix was not better organization. It was aggressive pruning and a decay policy.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /decision-making
- /experience
- October 13, 2025 4 min
Managing up to a non-technical founder without losing your integrity
Business-outcome framing for every technical decision. Risk quantified in dollars, not story points. Never say "technical debt" without a customer impact number.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /cross-functional
- /decision-making
- /blog
- October 6, 2025 4 min
Upgrading to Next.js 16 inside a Payload CMS monorepo was harder than expected
Cache Components and React Compiler 1.0 are compelling, but upgrading inside a CMS-coupled codebase surfaced dependency conflicts that deserved their own sprint.
- /react
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /learning
- September 24, 2025 5 min
What payment reconciliation systems teach you about distributed consistency
Eventual consistency in payment reconciliation is a business requirement, not a technical compromise. Idempotency keys and reconciliation windows replaced two-phase commits.
- /fintech
- /financeops
- /architecture
- /postgres
- /blog
- September 17, 2025 4 min
The one-on-one framework I use after fifteen years of getting one-on-ones wrong
Three fixed sections: blockers with deadlines, career trajectory, and one question the report chooses. Structure creates safety without drift.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /career
- /experience
- September 10, 2025 4 min
Sonnet 4.5 replaced our first-pass code review and nobody complained
AI handles style violations and missing error handling. Human reviewers focus on architecture and business logic. Review turnaround dropped from 24 hours to 4.
- /ai-ml
- /engineering-leadership
- /ci-cd
- /blog
- September 3, 2025 5 min
Running Kafka at startup scale is a decision you will regret exactly once
Kafka was justified for our payment event streaming. The operational burden in year two consumed a disproportionate share of platform bandwidth.
- /kafka
- /architecture
- /startup-life
- /financeops
- /learning
- August 25, 2025 4 min
How I use Grafana dashboards to run engineering meetings instead of slide decks
Replacing weekly status slides with live Grafana dashboards eliminated performative reporting and forced teams to instrument what matters.
- /observability
- /engineering-leadership
- /cross-functional
- /blog
- August 18, 2025 4 min
The founder said ship in two weeks. I said no. Here is what happened.
A major customer deal hinged on a feature in two weeks. I pushed for three. The extra week saved us on day four.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /cross-functional
- /experience
- August 11, 2025 4 min
GPT-5 shipped and my team asked if we still need junior engineers
The answer is yes, but for reasons that forced us to articulate what junior engineers actually contribute beyond lines of code.
- /engineering-leadership
- /ai-ml
- /hiring
- /decision-making
- /blog
- August 4, 2025 4 min
Why I stopped asking candidates to whiteboard and started asking them to review pull requests
Whiteboard coding measures performance under artificial stress. PR reviews measure what the job actually requires.
- /hiring
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /blog
- July 28, 2025 4 min
My homelab staging cluster caught a production bug before CI did
A memory leak only manifested under sustained 48-hour load. CI tests pass in seconds. The homelab k3s cluster caught what automated tests could not.
- /homelab
- /k3s
- /observability
- /ci-cd
- /experience
- July 21, 2025 4 min
Fintech compliance is not a checkbox. It is an architecture constraint.
Compliance that lives in code survives team turnover. Compliance that lives in spreadsheets does not.
- /fintech
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /blog
- July 14, 2025 4 min
The Kubernetes upgrade that taught me release engineering is a leadership problem
A Kubernetes 1.34 upgrade stalled for six weeks not because of technical complexity, but because nobody owned the migration sequence.
- /kubernetes
- /engineering-leadership
- /ci-cd
- /learning
- July 7, 2025 4 min
Two years in and I finally stopped rewriting the org chart every quarter
Constant restructuring is a symptom of unclear ownership, not wrong structure. Org charts stabilize when decision rights are explicit.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /startup-life
- /experience
- June 30, 2025 5 min
Eighteen months in: the five things I would tell myself on day one as Head of Engineering at a startup
Delegate before you are ready. Learn compliance before it learns you. Your cofounder's priorities are not wrong, just different. Tech debt compounds faster than you think. And the hardest one: your job is not to write the best code.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /career
- /experience
- June 23, 2025 4 min
Kubernetes 1.33 and the features that finally made me stop questioning container orchestration for small teams
Every six months someone says Kubernetes is overkill for a small team. Kubernetes 1.33 continued a trend of sane defaults and reduced overhead that invalidates that argument for teams deploying more than two services.
- /kubernetes
- /k3s
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /blog
- June 19, 2025 5 min
The on-call rotation that was just me, and why I finally admitted that was not sustainable
For 14 months I was the only person who got paged at 3 AM. The real reason was not team size. It was that I did not trust anyone else to handle production incidents.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /observability
- /startup-life
- /experience
- June 16, 2025 4 min
Building Cloudflare Tunnel access to our homelab staging so the team stops saying "works on my machine"
Our k3s staging cluster sat behind my home network. Cloudflare Tunnels gave the whole team stable HTTPS access without exposing my home IP or managing VPN credentials.
- /cloudflare
- /homelab
- /self-hosting
- /ci-cd
- /blog
- June 9, 2025 4 min
Cross-functional friction is a feature, not a bug, if you build the right feedback loops
For months I treated pushback from product, sales, and compliance as obstacles to velocity. The reframe: friction between teams is signal about misaligned priorities, and the right response is better feedback loops.
- /cross-functional
- /engineering-leadership
- /financeops
- /team-building
- /experience
- June 2, 2025 5 min
TypeScript strict mode migration: the six-month project I wish I had done in month one
We started with TypeScript loose mode because "we will tighten it later." Eighteen months and 40,000 lines later, migrating to strict surfaced 847 errors, including three that affected financial calculations.
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /ci-cd
- /financeops
- /blog
- May 26, 2025 5 min
Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4: the week AI coding tools stopped being novelties and became infrastructure
When Claude Opus 4 hit 72.5% on SWE-bench and solved a TypeScript generics issue that had stumped our team, the conversation shifted from "should we use AI" to "how do we integrate it."
- /ai-ml
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /engineering-leadership
- /blog
- May 12, 2025 5 min
Founder dynamics: when your technical opinion conflicts with the CEO's investor promise
The CEO told investors we would launch a new vertical by Q3. I told the CEO we needed Q3 for infrastructure debt. We were both right, which made it worse.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /cross-functional
- /decision-making
- /experience
- May 5, 2025 4 min
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo: building an observability stack that a four-person team actually uses
Most observability guides assume a platform team. We do not have one. The hard part was not installation but building dashboards engineers actually check daily.
- /observability
- /kubernetes
- /architecture
- /self-hosting
- /blog
- April 28, 2025 5 min
The compliance audit that exposed every shortcut we took in our first year
Our first formal compliance audit surfaced 23 findings. Hardcoded keys, PII in logs, missing audit trails. None malicious, all "we will fix that later." The remediation sprint that followed.
- /fintech
- /security
- /cross-functional
- /architecture
- /experience
- April 21, 2025 4 min
OpenAI o3 and o4-mini: reasoning models are getting good enough to replace junior code review
o3 drops 20% fewer major errors than o1, and o4-mini makes reasoning affordable for CI pipelines. A financial calculation rounding error caught by AI review that three humans missed.
- /ai-ml
- /ci-cd
- /typescript
- /engineering-leadership
- /blog
- April 14, 2025 5 min
Why I stopped mass-applying "best practices" and started asking "best for what"
Microservices, event sourcing, CQRS, DDD. I had been cargo-culting patterns from companies 100x our size. The question "who benefits from this complexity" changed my architectural decisions.
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /experience
- April 7, 2025 5 min
ArgoCD and GitOps for a team of four: overkill or exactly right
After three months of ArgoCD managing our k3s and production clusters, the deployment confidence, audit trail, and rollback speed paid for the setup cost within the first incident.
- /argocd
- /kubernetes
- /ci-cd
- /k3s
- /blog
- March 31, 2025 5 min
The quarterly planning meeting that taught me product managers and engineers solve different problems
I walked into Q2 planning with technical improvements. Product walked in with customer churn data. We talked past each other for two hours before building a framework to bridge both worldviews.
- /cross-functional
- /engineering-leadership
- /financeops
- /startup-life
- /experience
- March 24, 2025 4 min
Our Kafka consumer lag crisis and why I stopped trusting "it works on my machine" for event-driven systems
Consumer lag grew silently for two weeks because local dev processed events instantly while production dealt with partition rebalancing and back-pressure from a slow downstream service.
- /kafka
- /observability
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /blog
- March 17, 2025 4 min
Google's $32B Wiz acquisition and what it signals about security as a first-class infrastructure concern
Google paying $32B for a cloud security startup signals that security is no longer a checkbox but a competitive differentiator, especially in fintech where trust is the product.
- /security
- /aws
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /blog
- March 10, 2025 5 min
Learning to delegate when every task feels faster to do yourself
For six months I was the bottleneck on every code review, architecture decision, and production deploy. Delegation felt slower because it was. The turning point was redefining my job.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /experience
- March 3, 2025 5 min
Postgres connection pooling: the problem you do not know you have until you have 50 concurrent users
Our Node.js API opened a new PostgreSQL connection per request. At 50 concurrent users we exhausted the connection limit and the whole system halted. PgBouncer fixed it.
- /postgres
- /architecture
- /node
- /financeops
- /blog
- February 24, 2025 5 min
When the sales team demos a feature that does not exist yet and engineering finds out from a prospect
A prospect called asking for help configuring a feature our sales deck showed but engineering had never built. The fallout was not the scramble but the trust erosion between teams.
- /cross-functional
- /startup-life
- /financeops
- /decision-making
- /experience
- February 17, 2025 5 min
Claude 3.7 Sonnet's extended thinking and what it means for code review at a small team
Extended thinking mode changed how I approach code review on a team too small for dedicated reviewers. Step-by-step deliberation catches subtle type issues that fast-pass models miss.
- /ai-ml
- /ci-cd
- /engineering-leadership
- /typescript
- /blog
- February 3, 2025 5 min
The tech debt spreadsheet that made my cofounder finally understand why we need a refactoring sprint
Saying "we have tech debt" to a non-technical cofounder is meaningless. A spreadsheet mapping each debt item to customer-facing risk and remediation cost finally moved the conversation.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /cross-functional
- /architecture
- /experience
- January 27, 2025 5 min
DeepSeek R1 and the moment I realized open-source AI would change how we build internal tools
DeepSeek R1 shipped as a 671B open-source model matching GPT-4o benchmarks for under $6M training cost. Self-hostable reasoning models change the calculus for regulated fintech.
- /ai-ml
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /decision-making
- /blog
- January 20, 2025 5 min
Migrating from REST to a hybrid REST/event architecture without stopping the train
Our reconciliation engine needed async event processing but API consumers expected synchronous responses. The strangler fig pattern applied to a fintech data pipeline.
- /kafka
- /architecture
- /api-design
- /node
- /blog
- January 13, 2025 5 min
I mass-rejected 200 resumes and hired the person who asked the best questions in the interview
Our first structured hiring round attracted 200+ applications. The person we hired had a weaker resume than a dozen others but asked questions that revealed deep systems thinking.
- /hiring
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /experience
- January 6, 2025 5 min
AWS re:Invent announcements that actually matter for a three-person fintech team
Aurora DSQL, S3 Tables, Amazon Nova. re:Invent 2024 dropped a firehose of announcements, but most solve problems we will not have for years. Three that actually changed our roadmap.
- /aws
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /decision-making
- /blog
2024
35 posts- December 23, 2024 4 min
Setting up k3s on a mini PC for staging and why every startup needs a junk drawer environment
A $300 mini PC running k3s gave our team a staging environment that mirrors production topology without the cloud bill. The real value was deployment confidence.
- /k3s
- /kubernetes
- /homelab
- /self-hosting
- /blog
- December 16, 2024 5 min
The meeting where product, sales, and engineering all had different definitions of "real-time"
Product wanted sub-second dashboard updates. Sales had promised "real-time" reconciliation. Engineering was thinking about eventual consistency with 30-second polling. One word nearly derailed a quarter of work.
- /cross-functional
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /decision-making
- /experience
- December 9, 2024 4 min
React 19 Server Components in production: the migration nobody warns you about
React 19 shipped with Server Components stable and the React Compiler, but migrating a real fintech dashboard was nothing like the blog posts suggested.
- /react
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /ci-cd
- /blog
- November 25, 2024 4 min
Why our compliance team rewrites my API specs and I have learned to be grateful
In fintech, your API surface is a regulatory document. Our compliance officer started redlining my OpenAPI specs and improved our API design more than any tech review.
- /api-design
- /fintech
- /cross-functional
- /security
- /experience
- November 18, 2024 5 min
Hiring engineer number three when you can barely keep engineer number one from burning out
I posted a job listing for our third engineer while privately wondering if our first hire was about to quit. What I got wrong about workload distribution.
- /hiring
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /team-building
- /experience
- November 11, 2024 4 min
What Payload CMS 3.0 taught me about choosing frameworks that grow with you
Payload CMS 3.0 shipped with native Next.js App Router integration, validating a framework evaluation approach that prioritizes embeddability over feature count.
- /react
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /blog
- November 4, 2024 4 min
The day our monolith's database hit 80% CPU and nobody noticed until sales called
A slow query compounded by a missing index took our PostgreSQL instance to the brink. Sales noticed before engineering did because client reports were timing out.
- /postgres
- /observability
- /architecture
- /financeops
- /experience
- October 23, 2024 5 min
Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 and the week I mass-refactored our codebase with an AI pair programmer
I used Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 to refactor our error handling layer, migrate 80 test files, and generate TypeScript types from our OpenAPI spec. This is a workflow journal.
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /ai-ml
- /startup-life
- /blog
- October 9, 2024 4 min
Next.js 15, Turbopack stable, and the mass codebase migration nobody is talking about
Next.js 15 shipped with Turbopack stable and async request APIs that break every existing middleware and dynamic page in your application.
- /react
- /node
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /blog
- September 25, 2024 4 min
The night our database ran out of connections and what I learned about pooling
At 2am our payment processing froze. Every database connection was consumed by long-running report queries sharing a pool with transactions.
- /postgres
- /node
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /experience
- September 18, 2024 5 min
Making technology bets: how I evaluate frameworks when the wrong choice costs a year
At a startup, picking the wrong framework is a survival threat. Here is the five-criteria scoring model I use for every significant technology decision.
- /decision-making
- /architecture
- /startup-life
- /experience
- September 11, 2024 4 min
PostgreSQL 17 just dropped and COPY performance alone makes the upgrade worth it
PostgreSQL 17 shipped with 2x COPY performance, JSON_TABLE, and MERGE with RETURNING. The COPY improvement cut our nightly import from 12 minutes to under 6.
- /postgres
- /fintech
- /architecture
- /blog
- September 4, 2024 5 min
Observability on a shoestring: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo for free
We could not afford Datadog. I self-hosted the Grafana stack on our k3s homelab cluster and pointed production at it.
- /observability
- /kubernetes
- /homelab
- /docker
- /blog
- August 28, 2024 3 min
Why every API endpoint at FinanceOps returns the same error shape
Our frontend had seven different error format handlers. I standardized every endpoint to return the same discriminated union error shape.
- /api-design
- /typescript
- /node
- /fintech
- /blog
- August 21, 2024 5 min
Full-stack chaos: when the founder, PM, and head of engineering are all you
In a single Tuesday I triaged a database lock, wrote a product spec, pitched an investor, and reviewed a PR. Wearing every hat is a failure mode.
- /startup-life
- /engineering-leadership
- /cross-functional
- /experience
- August 14, 2024 4 min
The PostgreSQL query that took 47 seconds and how I got it to 3 milliseconds
A financial report query joined five tables across 2 million rows and took 47 seconds. The fix was not adding an index.
- /postgres
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /blog
- August 7, 2024 4 min
ArgoCD on a single-node k3s cluster: overkill or exactly right
Everyone told me ArgoCD on a single-node homelab was absurd. GitOps on a single node means I can rebuild from a Git repo in under 10 minutes.
- /argocd
- /k3s
- /homelab
- /kubernetes
- /blog
- July 31, 2024 4 min
Docker multi-stage builds that actually make your images small
Our production Docker image was 1.2 GB. After an afternoon of optimization it was 89 MB. Here is the exact Dockerfile evolution.
- /docker
- /ci-cd
- /node
- /blog
- July 24, 2024 5 min
Hiring our first engineer: the mass-interview process I built as a non-recruiter
No ATS, no recruiter, no playbook. I built the entire hiring pipeline from scratch and we interviewed 30 candidates to make one perfect hire.
- /hiring
- /startup-life
- /engineering-leadership
- /experience
- July 17, 2024 4 min
Why we picked React Server Components over a separate API layer
I tried React Server Components for our internal dashboard and realized I could eliminate the entire API serialization layer for read-heavy pages.
- /react
- /node
- /architecture
- /api-design
- /blog
- July 10, 2024 4 min
Building a payment reconciliation engine that catches every penny
When your product handles financial transactions, close enough is not a rounding strategy. Here is the three-way reconciliation engine I built.
- /fintech
- /financeops
- /postgres
- /architecture
- /blog
- July 3, 2024 4 min
Setting up Cloudflare Tunnels so I never open a port on my homelab again
I replaced every port forward with a zero-trust Cloudflare Tunnel in a single evening. Here is the exact setup.
- /cloudflare
- /homelab
- /self-hosting
- /security
- /blog
- June 26, 2024 4 min
TypeScript 5.5 inferred type predicates changed how I write validation code
TypeScript 5.5 shipped inferred type predicates and it quietly eliminated an entire category of boilerplate in our codebase.
- /typescript
- /api-design
- /blog
- June 19, 2024 4 min
The AWS bill that made me rethink everything about infrastructure
Our third month AWS bill was 4x what I projected. The culprit was not compute. It was data transfer, NAT gateway charges, and CloudWatch log ingestion.
- /aws
- /architecture
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /experience
- June 12, 2024 4 min
How I use PostgreSQL as a job queue and why you probably should too
Every guide says use Redis or BullMQ for background jobs. I used PostgreSQL SKIP LOCKED and it handled thousands of jobs per day with zero additional infrastructure.
- /postgres
- /node
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /blog
- June 5, 2024 5 min
Startup engineering culture when you are the only engineer
For the first four months I was the entire engineering department. No code reviews, no architecture discussions. Here are the practices I invented to stay honest.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /experience
- May 29, 2024 4 min
Building a real-time notification system with zero external dependencies
We needed real-time payment notifications but could not justify Redis or a managed WebSocket service. SSE and PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY did the job.
- /node
- /react
- /api-design
- /architecture
- /blog
- May 22, 2024 4 min
Node.js 22 dropped and here is what actually matters for production backends
Node.js 22 shipped with require(esm) and a built-in WebSocket client. Here is what I benchmarked and what I adopted immediately.
- /node
- /typescript
- /architecture
- /blog
- May 15, 2024 4 min
My first homelab rack: a mini PC, k3s, and the itch to self-host everything
I bought a used mini PC for $180, installed k3s, and spent a weekend migrating my side projects off Vercel free tier.
- /homelab
- /k3s
- /self-hosting
- /experience
- May 8, 2024 4 min
Designing a multi-tenant PostgreSQL schema that does not make you cry at 3am
Shared database, shared schema, row-level security. That was the bet. Here is how it played out.
- /postgres
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /api-design
- /blog
- May 1, 2024 4 min
What nobody tells you about building fintech: compliance is a product feature
I walked into FinanceOps thinking I was building software. Six months later I realized I was building a compliance platform that happens to have software around it.
- /fintech
- /financeops
- /startup-life
- /experience
- April 24, 2024 4 min
The mass migration: moving 200 API endpoints to TypeScript strict mode in one sprint
A production bug from an unchecked null cost us a weekend. I spent the next sprint converting 200 API endpoints to strict mode.
- /typescript
- /api-design
- /architecture
- /blog
- April 17, 2024 4 min
Standing up CI/CD from scratch with GitHub Actions and zero budget
No DevOps person. No budget. I built our entire CI/CD pipeline in a single weekend using GitHub Actions free tier.
- /ci-cd
- /docker
- /startup-life
- /blog
- April 10, 2024 4 min
Bootstrapping a Next.js monolith when everyone says microservices
I shipped our entire fintech platform as a single Next.js application. Here is why a monolith was the right call for a team of three.
- /react
- /node
- /architecture
- /startup-life
- /blog
- April 3, 2024 4 min
Why I chose PostgreSQL over MongoDB and how it shaped our entire fintech stack
Every fintech startup I talked to was defaulting to MongoDB. I went the other way and bet on PostgreSQL with strict schemas from day one.
- /postgres
- /architecture
- /fintech
- /decision-making
- /experience