Staff, Not Author
How I use AI for my books
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Helpful Hieroglyphics
Latest posts
From Markdown to Print
One source pipeline that produces both PDF and ebook.
The Words You Do Not Have
In 1987 English made me faster and stupider in the same week. Last month a reader caught it happening to my novel.
Why I Wrote a Tech Thriller
The hacking was never the unrealistic part
When Exports Become Accidental APIs
Visibility domains and architectural drift on the BEAM
The Shared State of Isolation.
Why Systems Collapse Under Load (and How to Fix It)
Your Code Has No Memory
From code change to intent, there and back again
The Late-Night Feeling of Wonder
The Late-Night Feeling of Wonder In 1980 my ten years older sister started university and brought home a TI-58 programmable calculator. I was ten years old. I found out you could give it instructions and it would follow them. That was enough. I was done for. Within a year I had convinced my parents to buy a VIC-20. I learned BASIC, then 6502 assembler, because BASIC was too slow for what I wanted…
Why I Built a Course on the BEAM
Understanding the runtime changes how you build on it.
Observers: The Watchful Gnomes of the Village
Processes that watch, restart, and enforce lifetimes
Gatekeepers: The Traffic Controllers of the Gnome Village
Processes that protect the system from the outside world, and from itself
Routers: Processes That Only Decide Where Stuff Goes
The Gnome Village Mailmen
Resource Owners: One Process, One Piece of State
The boring, reliable center of most good systems
Workers: Do One Job, Then Get Out of the Way
Short-lived processes, polite pools, and where people overcomplicate things
Process Archetypes: The Roles in the Gnome Village
Every process has a job. Problems start when it has two.
Gnomes, Domains, and Flows: Putting It Together
From checklist to a running payments path
Flows Keep Work Moving
Design data, message, process, and call paths on purpose
Domains Own Code and Data
Keep modules, OTP apps, and state in the same lane
Gnomes, Domains, and Flows
Why boundaries decide whether the village holds
Supervisors Are Managers
Build a village of gnomes, not a park of machines.
The Gnome Village
Threads fight. Gnomes cooperate.
Exposing the 'Multibank Crypto Poker' Recruitment Scam
If it looks too good to be true, it is
Exactly once
Exactly once
Assembler, Stepper Motors, and a Hotel Pool
Revisiting the animatronic spy drama of Haparanda Stadshotell, three decades later
Why I Wrote the BEAM Book
Post-mortems, coffee, and a decade of stubborn curiosity
Your Finance Stack Is Lying to You
Accidental Complexity in Fintech
AI Rubber Ducking: When Your Duck Starts Talking Back
Debugging with an AI duck that asks questions back
The BEAM Book Is Almost Done. Here's What Writing It Taught Me.
Reflections on scope, clarity, and the joys of letting go.
Why Some Fintechs Scale Seamlessly; and Others Crash and Burn
Most fintech backends break under pressure. Yours doesn't have to.
Summon Your AI Sidekick: Building a Tireless Personal Coach
When Your AI Coach is Named Orrin
The Best Issue Ever Reported on GitHub
This one's a feature, definitely not a bug
Hyperchains: Your Own L1 with Aeternity Tech
Set Your Own Fees, Scale Without Limits
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous: Clearing the Confusion
Messaging, APIs, RPC, and Other Buzzwords Explained
RabbitMQ Reliability: A Reality Check
Reliability depends on topology, guarantees, and operations.
Forget Microservices: Just Use Erlang.
A distributed system, without the distributed headaches.
The Hidden Cost of Bad Payment Architecture
Because 'It Works' Is Not the Same as 'It Works Well'
Opinions: Just the Facts, 11 Years Later
Still no opinions. Mostly.
Microservices Are NOT an Excuse for Chaos
How Overcomplicating Your Architecture Can Destroy Scalability Instead of Enabling It
Getting the hang of Rebar3
Rebar3 is the standard build tool and package manager for the Erlang programming language. While the official documentation is pretty good, it can be hard for a beginner to grasp what Rebar3 is really doing at times, and why; in particular how profiles and releases and dependencies work, where the build results end up, and so on. This guide assumes you already have installed Erlang and Rebar and…
Why Windows 11 Virtual Desktop Switching Is Slow
And How to Fix It
Developer Productivity for Early-Career Engineers
A course note for newer developers
Developer Productivity for Experienced Engineers
A course note for senior developers
Developer Productivity
Notes on attention, workflow, and engineering habits
Dev Containers Part 3: UIDs and file ownership
This is the third entry in a series of posts on devcontainers; the first entry is here . In the previous post , we showed how to configure devcontainers for a small project and how to access the environment from within Emacs. The project directory mount A running container is an isolated bubble, a separate operating system instance, and by default it does not have access to the host's file system.…
Enhancing Fintech Security with Erlang
Build Scalable and Reliable Fintech Systems with Erlang
How Erlang Powers High-Volume Finance
Build Scalable and Reliable Fintech Systems with Erlang
TIPS and RIX-Inst: Navigating the Future of Real-Time Payments in the EU
Opportunities and Challenges for Fintech Companies
Developer Types
Addressing the Elephant in the Room
The Quest for Enhanced Productivity in Software Development
A Reflection One and a Half Decades Later
Designing Concurrent Systems on the BEAM
Principles and Strategies for Robust System Design