I think about and work on real-time distributed systems. I write about what worked, what didn't, and the numbers behind both.
Latest post
The best guardrail is the one you can delete
Our AI matcher kept returning the wrong ID, so we wrote a guard to catch it. The stronger fix was to stop asking the model for IDs at all, which deleted the guard. Design intent belongs in the pipeline, not the prompt.
Currently thinking about
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Usage in all areas of our everyday life. What changes when an agent becomes the daily driver. Throughput, cycle time, change-failure rate — with their caveats.
📺 Real-time streaming platforms
Real-time quality analysis of video streams. Event-time semantics, the consistency boundary, the bugs that don't show up until production.
⚖️ Engineering judgment
Build vs buy, instrument-before-you-rollout, when to defer. The decisions that don't make it into postmortems but should.
📐 Architecture & infrastructure
Terraform at a startup, schema evolution, the database choices you regret six months later.
Other sections
- 📚 Reading — see what I'm reading on the books page or follow my Goodreads
- 🛠️ Building — public side projects on the projects page
- 💼 Hiring me — see about for contact + availability