Serverless Done Right
Serverless works for event-driven, bursty, stateless workloads. Here's how to avoid cold start pain, manage state, choose the right granularity, and know when containers are better....
Your Users Don't Care About Your Architecture
The graveyard is full of startups with beautiful architecture and zero traction. 70% of failed startups scaled prematurely. Ship something simple, learn what users want, iterate fast....
Mutation Testing Primer: Finding Real Bugs
Mutation testing answers what coverage can't: do your tests actually catch bugs? Learn how to use mutation testing tools to find the gaps in your test suite and write tests that genuinely verify corre...
The Layer Tax: Every Abstraction Has a Price
Every abstraction layer has a cost. Benchmarks showing the real price of convenience from someone who built fast systems in the 90s and slow ones today....
Why AI Can't Count the R's in Strawberry
LLMs confidently say strawberry has two R's because they've never seen letters—only tokens. This tokenization blindness predicts where AI will fail....
When CompuServe Was the Internet
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and chat for 3 million users before the web. The community-building lessons from that era—invested moderators, friction as a feature, human-scale communities—remain...
Crypto Is Bad in All Sorts of Ways
Environmental destruction, greater fool economics, regulatory arbitrage, and ransomware's favorite payment method. The SEC was right all along....
The Inventions I Never Shipped
Over 45 years, I noticed a pattern: I keep building things that later become billion-dollar companies. This is less about timing and more about recognizing when something you built for yourself might ...
The Best Code I Ever Wrote Was Deleted
The hardest skill in software engineering isn't writing code - it's knowing when to delete it. Stories of systems that improved by subtraction....
FidoNet: The Internet Before the Internet
FidoNet was a global network connecting thousands of BBSs via scheduled phone calls. Email, newsgroups, file distribution - everything we associate with the internet existed first on FidoNet....
Barren Realms Elite and the Golden Age of BBS Door Games
Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite - BBS door games created the template for online gaming. First-person perspective from a SysOp who ran them....
What the Navy Taught Me About Perspective
I joined the Navy at 18 and got deployed to Desert Shield right out of boot camp. No combat heroics - just years on ships, traveling the world, and being part of the Missouri's decommissioning crew. T...
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