Testing the Migration, Not Just the Code
I remember sitting in a dimly lit office at 2:00 AM, staring at a terminal window that refused to scroll, […]
Works on My Machine, and Why That Matters
I remember sitting in a dim office at 2:00 AM, staring at a payment gateway integration that was behaving perfectly […]
Going Deep Without Painting Yourself in
I spent three weeks last month untangling a legacy payment gateway that had been “optimized” by a specialist who thought […]
Coverage Tells You Where You Did Not Look
I spent three years of my life maintaining a legacy payment gateway where the dashboard proudly displayed 94% code coverage. […]
A Stack Trace Is a Story Told Backwards
Most tutorials on how to read a stack trace treat it like a clean, linear map leading you straight to […]
The Gap Between What You Know and What You See
I’ve spent twenty years staring at legacy payment code that looks like it was written by a caffeinated toddler, and […]
Write Code That Is Easy to Delete, Not to Extend
I spent three weeks last year trying to decommission a legacy payment gateway that should have taken three hours. It […]
Generated Code Is Still Code You Own
I spent three hours last Tuesday staring at a stack trace that shouldn’t have existed, all because I let an […]
Errors Tripled at 14:12. Why?
Most tutorials treat debugging like a clean, linear path through a well-lit forest, but anyone who has spent twenty years […]
Four Database Metrics Worth an Alert
I’ve spent twenty years cleaning up the messes left behind by developers who thought “set it and forget it” was […]