I build things and write stuff

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  The longer I work on Rails monoliths, the more I appreciate boring architecture. Most complexity enters through exceptions, not through the happy path.

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  Every system eventually gets the monitoring it deserved on day one. The only question is whether you add it before or after the outage.

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  Self-hosting isn’t hard because servers are hard. It’s hard because you’re now responsible for every operational decision your platform vendor used to make.

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  The biggest productivity gain from coding agents isn’t writing code. It’s having a second engineer that never gets tired of reading 40 files to answer a single question.

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  One-million-token context windows sound like magic until you ask what entered the window. Old decisions.
Dead code.
Stale docs.
Conflicting conventions.
Half-written diffs. More context can help. It also raises the review bar for what context is allowed to steer the patch.