“We need search” is one of the most under-scoped requirements in backend work. Reach for Elasticsearch too early and you’ve bought a second datastore to operate, sync, and keep consistent. Lean on ...
Scraping one website is a script. Scraping thousands of heterogeneous websites into a single clean schema — and keeping it fresh — is a system. The hard parts are rarely the parsing; they’re struct...
When you need to monitor and control a fleet of machines in real time — endpoints, devices, agents — HTTP polling falls apart fast. You want push, not poll; secure identity, not shared secrets; and...
The moment business or security rules are hard-coded, every rule change becomes a deploy. For a fleet of agents that need rules to change now — and to keep enforcing even when offline — that’s a no...
Approval workflows look trivial until you meet the real org chart. Different departments have different chains, approvers change roles, and “two levels up” means something different for everyone. H...
Alongside writing software early in my career, I spent time as a robotics instructor. I expected it to be a break from engineering. Instead it turned out to be some of the most useful engineering t...
Most software is built for adults who’ll tolerate a clunky interface to get their job done. Children won’t. Working on an online learning platform for kids early in my career taught me that your us...
This was one of the first real systems I built as a developer — a C# procurement application for a nationwide retail chain. School projects have tidy inputs and no consequences; this had real branc...