Never Store Money in a Float
I still remember the 3:00 AM pager alert from a legacy settlement engine I was maintaining—a system that had been […]
Being Remote and Still Being Present
I spent three years maintaining a legacy payment gateway where the “remote culture” was essentially a polite way of saying […]
Backups That Run Without You Remembering
I’ve spent twenty years staring at database logs, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the “automated […]
Picking a Database for Reasons You Can Defend
I spent three days last month staring at a deadlocked production environment because someone followed a “getting started” guide that […]
Thirty Redirects and Back Where You Started
I was staring at a flickering monitor at 2:00 AM, the kind of silence that only exists when you’re the […]
Versioning an Api Is a Promise About the Past
I remember sitting in a cold data center three years ago, watching a dashboard turn a violent shade of red […]
The Fix Deployed. the Browser Disagreed.
It’s 2:00 AM, the house is silent, and I’m staring at a terminal window wondering why the database says one […]
Scheduled Jobs Need Locks and Alarms
I spent three years maintaining a legacy payment gateway that crashed every time a developer tried to implement a “streamlined” […]
Writing the Event in the Same Transaction
I remember sitting in a dimly lit office at 2:00 AM, watching a dashboard bleed red as a distributed transaction […]
Picking the Next Thing to Learn Deliberately
I spent my morning staring at a legacy payment gateway written in a dialect of Java that hasn’t been relevant […]