Why constraints breed creativity
Distributed systems fail in ways that are hard to predict. After years of debugging production incidents, certain patterns keep recurring. This post explores a few.
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The cost of context switching
Most codebases grow in directions their authors never anticipated. The pressure to optimize early is real, but constraints often produce more elegant solutions than freedom ever could.
From the archive
Performance optimization is a tempting distraction. Every line of code that exists to optimize one specific case is a line that must be maintained and understood forever.
About this site
These are my notes on building reliable, readable, maintainable systems. Interested in clarity over cleverness.
Thoughts on design. Updated weekly.
Elsewhere
Occasional notes on systems topics. Archives here.