The Compound Returns of Boring Architecture
Why the most productive codebases I have ever worked in were relentlessly dull, and what that teaches us about the seductive trap of premature abstraction.
ArchitectureNotes on software craft, fatherhood, and the long game of building things that last. Arranged chronologically, newest first.
2026
Why the most productive codebases I have ever worked in were relentlessly dull, and what that teaches us about the seductive trap of premature abstraction.
ArchitectureA variable name is a micro-essay. It must compress intention, scope, and type into a handful of characters. Here is how I approach the problem after twenty years.
CraftFrom my first Express route handler in 2014 to modern runtime wars. The landscape has changed; the fundamentals have not.
Node.js2025
He is ten and wanted to build a game. I sat beside him and watched him struggle with off-by-one errors for a week. It was the hardest and best parenting decision I made this year.
FatherhoodYour deployment pipeline reveals more about your team than any retrospective. I dissect three real pipelines and what they say about the organizations that built them.
DevOpsIt processed eleven million requests a day, had four endpoints, and required zero on-call pages in eighteen months. This is its story.
ArchitectureSpeed without direction is just thrashing. A case for measured velocity, careful interfaces, and the discipline of saying “not yet.”
PhilosophyMost applications treat configuration as an afterthought — a .env file, some environment variables, maybe a YAML file. Here is a better way.
I have been restoring a 1978 Marantz receiver with my daughter. She is learning about capacitors. I am learning about patience.
PersonalA well-written Dockerfile tells you everything about an application’s runtime dependencies, build process, and operational assumptions. Most are written poorly.
DockerAfter years of maintaining dozens of microservice repositories, I moved everything into a single monorepo. The results were immediate and surprising.
Tooling