Essays & Articles

2026 8

May 30 No more asking ‘who are you’; we have all been reduced to a passphrase.

personal

May 21 The moat was never the code

startups

May 14 statement_timeout 0: Dirty plates, dead cooks, and kitchen fires

engineering

Apr 28 We made this hard: over-engineering the web

engineering

Apr 11 How Postgres works at scale

postgres

Mar 24 Your README is a landing page, you just don’t know it yet

open-source writing

Mar 03 Every company has two org charts. One of them is bullshit

Jan 03 Wide tables and query validation

ruby

2025 6

Dec 28 I got out of federal prison and couldn’t log into my GitHub

personal

Dec 01 Interactive Rails playgrounds

ruby

Nov 20 How to get a job as a felon

personal

Oct 14 When you don’t look autistic

personal

Sep 18 Going to federal prison for piracy

personal

Sep 01 Loud for selfish reasons

personal

2024 1

Dec 31 HTTP 451

personal

2023 2

Aug 12 Gem configuration patterns

ruby

Mar 24 Creating a conventional, Stripe-like API with Grape and Ruby on Rails

ruby

2022 3

Dec 27 A plea for administration

personal

Nov 24 Database constraints first, validations second

ruby

Jun 11 REST-only controllers

ruby

2021 3

Jun 27 No service, still broken

personal

May 05 How to create a Ruby HTTP API client gem

ruby

Jan 14 Invest in your seeds file

ruby

2020 3

Sep 16 Writing as conversation

personal

Jul 19 Ruby blocks in a few minutes

ruby

Feb 19 I learned HTML from chickens

personal

2019 2

Nov 02 Prefer size over count

ruby

Aug 22 How Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord chaining works

ruby