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Severin Bucher | Blog
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COVID-19 History Project
A curated digital archive and searchable timeline of COVID-19 events and policy decisions.
DOGE API Download Tool
A simple GUI for downloading all DOGE-provided data as CSV files.
Snackeroo
A travel and snack blog by an American-Swiss duo, with an interactive map and search.
Writing Postcards With a 3D Printer
I read Amy Goodchild’s blog post about digitizing her handwriting in JavaScript a while ago and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I didn’t end up digitizing my own handwriting, but it pushed me toward a smaller idea: clamp a ballpoint pen to my 3D printer and let it write postcards for me. This post is the story of getting there, including the part where my printer almost drove…
Upgrading a Legacy Monorepo to React 18: What Nobody Warns You About
React 18 shipped in March 2022. We merged our upgrade in April 2026. If you do that math, yes, we were four years behind. This is a post about what that upgrade actually looked like across a large, multi-generational codebase, and the specific issues that ate most of the time. Spoiler: the “breaking changes” in the official React 18 migration guide are the easy part. The Starting Point…
Teaching Your AI to Use Your Component Library
AI coding assistants keep hallucinating EUI props. You paste in documentation, it gets ignored thirty messages later. You end up debugging code where half the props don’t exist. The fix is an MCP server, about 200 lines of TypeScript that gives any MCP-compatible AI direct access to the EUI source. What EUI is EUI (Elastic UI) is Elastic’s open-source React component library. It powers…
Stop Submitting Giant PRs Nobody Wants to Review
You know that feeling when you open a PR and it’s 47 files changed, 3,000 lines? The reviewer sighs, skims it, leaves a comment like “looks good,” and merges it. No real feedback, nothing caught. That isn’t code review, it’s rubber-stamping. Stacked PRs are a way out of that trap. The Basic Idea Instead of one massive PR, you break the work into a chain. Each branch…
The Broken Job Search: Why Applying to Big Tech is a Trap
If you’re applying to hundreds of jobs and hearing nothing back, it probably isn’t you. The way the funnel is set up works against you. Big companies dominate job boards like LinkedIn partly because they pay for placement. A single listing at a well-known corporation can pull over a thousand applications, and a lot of them get auto-filtered before a person ever looks. Even a strong…
A Practical Terminal-Based Development Environment
Most development sessions start with the same chore: bring up the backend, start the frontend build, open the database, get version control where you can see it. Before any actual work happens, a few minutes go to setting up the workspace. My setup gets rid of that. It runs almost entirely in the terminal, using tmuxp to build the session and a handful of tools for editing, file management, and…
My 4-Step Study Plan for Passing the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
As a web engineer doing full-stack work, I’ve spent years inside the AWS ecosystem. EC2, DynamoDB, Redis, Lambda, API Gateway, and S3 are part of my daily toolkit. I was comfortable building and deploying on them, but I also knew there was a lot of AWS I’d never touched and a lot of architectural reasoning I’d never had to do explicitly. So this year I set myself a goal at work:…
The Diminishing Quality of Content
I keep noticing that most of what I read online is worse than it used to be. There’s more of everything than ever, but it’s thinner: more articles that say nothing, more confident voices with no expertise behind them, more pages that exist to rank rather than to be read. I wanted to work out why, because I don’t think it comes down to one thing. Anyone can publish now, and that…
Introducing a Baby Chaos Monkey for Our Microservices
In a microservice system, the only real way to know how resilient you are is to break things on purpose and watch what happens. That’s the idea behind chaos engineering. Netflix’s Chaos Monkey is the famous example: it randomly kills services in production so the team finds out early whether the system can take it. Killing live services is overkill for most teams, especially outside…
Modern API Development with TypeSpec and OpenAPI
Designing clear, well-documented web APIs is a big part of building software. The most widely adopted standard for describing RESTful APIs is OpenAPI, a machine-readable format (usually JSON or YAML) that defines an API’s structure, endpoints, and request and response shapes. That schema becomes the single source of truth behind your interactive docs, client libraries, and server stubs.…
Enabling TypeScript Strict Mode in a Legacy React Project: A Gradual Approach
Our App was created in 2017. It is a React application written in TypeScript. At the time, TypeScript was gaining popularity, but strict type safety wasn’t a major concern for most teams. Our knowledge of TypeScript was limited, and the primary goal was to use it for basic type annotations rather than enforcing a fully type-safe codebase. As a result, strict mode was never turned on. The…
About
Hi, I’m Severin Bucher , a senior software engineer based in Washington D.C. I’ve spent over 10 years building secure backend services and frontend systems that run at scale. Most of that work lives in the AWS ecosystem, where I hold the Solutions Architect certification, and lately a lot of it is about using agentic AI and LLM workflows to ship complex changes faster. What I Do At…