I'm Fred — a software engineer who has spent the better part of two decades building things for the web. I write about code, about raising kids in a world full of screens, and about the small everyday moments that make this life interesting. Welcome to my corner of the internet.
Recent Writing
What started as a weekend project to automate my deployment workflow turned into a three-month journey through yak shaving, scope creep, and an unexpected lesson about knowing when something is done.
code lifeEvery Saturday, my daughter and I make pancakes. She measures, I pour. It's the closest thing we have to a family ritual, and I've started thinking about why that matters.
lifeOur deploy script had grown into a beast nobody wanted to touch. Here's how I rewrote it, what I learned about shell scripting's hidden costs, and why the rewrite almost didn't happen.
codeAfter twenty years, I've unlearned more than I've learned. A year-end accounting of the opinions I held that didn't survive contact with reality.
code lifeAbout
I'm a full-stack developer based in the U.S., currently building tools that help teams manage infrastructure without losing their minds. Before that, I spent years shipping APIs, wrangling databases, and writing JavaScript before it was cool (and after it stopped being cool, and then when it became cool again). Outside of work, I'm usually cooking something ambitious, reading to my kids, or taking the long way home. Say hello.