Articles
Long-form explorations
Narrative explanations of how and why systems end up the way they do.
Infrastructure
hlab: Turning a Proxmox Homelab into a Tiny Platform
A hobby project that turns Proxmox VM creation into a self-service platform experience: plans, templates, a dashboard TUI, and a headless CLI for automation and AI agents.
AI Engineering
Which LLM Would I Use for Backend Development?
I gave several LLMs the same Go backend assessment to see which one is actually useful in day-to-day software development. The result was less about who writes the most code and more about who survives verification.
Distributed Systems
Eventual Consistency Is a Product Decision
Consistency is usually filed under 'backend detail,' but staleness leaks straight into the interface and the business rules. Deciding how stale is acceptable is a product decision — here is how to treat it like one.
Software Architecture
Why Event-Driven Architectures Exist
Direct calls between services are simple until they aren't. Event-driven architecture is the answer to a specific failure of tightly coupled systems — here is the problem it actually solves.
Platform Engineering
Why Platform Engineering Matters
Every growing engineering org quietly builds a platform — the only question is whether anyone owns it. Platform engineering is the decision to treat that platform as a product, and here is the problem it solves.