Why defaults matter more
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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Building for the long tail
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.
From the archive
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.
About this site
I write about software architecture, distributed systems, and the craft of programming. Posts are infrequent but hopefully worth the wait.
Thoughts on code. Updated sporadically.
Elsewhere
Occasional writing on systems topics. Past essays here.