Developer

Building
software that
ships.

// Full-stack engineer exploring the edges
// of distributed systems, developer tooling,
// and the craft of clean architecture.

Read Tech Posts
$ whoami
fred.lackey
$ cat interests.txt
node.js, typescript, go
docker, kubernetes, aws
clean-code, dx, automation
$ _
Human

Stories from
the other side
of the screen.

On fatherhood, moving to new cities, the books that rewired my thinking, and the quiet rituals that keep the chaos at bay.

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Recent Builds

2026-02-14 · 8 min read
Why I Moved Our Entire Platform to Edge Functions

Cold starts were killing us. Here's how we dropped p99 latency from 2.3s to under 80ms by rethinking where code runs.

infrastructure performance
2026-02-07 · 12 min read
The Monorepo Migration Nobody Asked For

Consolidating 23 microservice repos into a single Turborepo workspace. What broke, what healed, and the tooling that made it possible.

tooling monorepo
2026-01-28 · 6 min read
Parsing HCL Files Without Losing Your Mind

A deep dive into building a Terraform file parser that actually handles nested blocks, expression evaluation, and module references.

go terraform

Recent Reflections

February 12, 2026 · 5 min read
The Year I Stopped Optimizing Everything

Somewhere between the fifth productivity app and the color-coded calendar, I realized I'd turned my life into a sprint backlog. Here's what happened when I stopped.

reflection
February 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Teaching My Daughter to Ride a Bike (and Letting Go)

She wobbled. She fell. She got back up. And at some point on that cracked sidewalk, I realized this wasn't really about the bike at all.

family
January 25, 2026 · 4 min read
Five Books That Changed How I Think About Work

Not the usual "business book" list. These are the odd, sideways reads that quietly rewired how I approach problems, teams, and craft.

books growth

The Technical Side

20+ years building software across the full stack. Currently focused on developer tooling, infrastructure automation, and helping teams ship faster without burning out. Open source contributor. Believer in boring technology for exciting problems.

100+
Open Source Repos
20+
Years Shipping
7
Languages Daily
Tabs vs Spaces Wars

The Rest of Me

Father, reader, reluctant runner, and occasional cook. I write about the messy, non-optimizable parts of life because they matter more than any codebase. Based in the Southeast, transplanted from everywhere.

47
Books This Year
3
Kids
6
Cities Lived In
1
Dog (the best one)