Notes on Building Software That Lasts

Expert Opinion Oct 05, 2026

A codebase that needs unwritten knowledge fails the engineer who joined last month and the AI agent you rolled out last quarter in exactly the same way. It is one problem, and it gets expensive fastest when a new team inherits a system somebody else built. Here is what I do when I inherit a system, and a thirty-minute test to measure the gap.

Expert Opinion Sep 12, 2026

I migrated the most used screen of a product I ran for ten years, in nine batches, with no downtime and no maintenance window. Here is why I refused the single cutover, the abstraction I could only see halfway through, and the blind spot my own migration plan was structurally unable to catch.

Expert Opinion Sep 11, 2026

PHP is the language I reach for most, by choice. The PHP I write has almost nothing in common with the code that gave the language its reputation. Here is what modern PHP actually looks like, the three criticisms I think are fair, and the rule I use to decide when it is the wrong tool.

Expert Opinion Aug 28, 2026

Writing code got cheap. Checking whether it is right did not. I lost most of a day to a change that was correct, reviewed, and built on a premise that was wrong from the first sentence. Here is the line I draw now and why it is about the premise, not the difficulty.

Expert Opinion Aug 18, 2026

Moving business logic out of database triggers and into application events does not simplify the system. It trades atomicity for visibility, and it buys a new class of bug. I retired eleven triggers on a live product, left ten running on purpose, and got the sequencing wrong.

Expert Opinion Aug 13, 2026

A database trigger runs on the database host, in database syntax, with no application log and no stack trace. When it breaks you do not hear it from your monitoring, you hear it from a customer. I moved a live SaaS off ten of them in about four weeks, one domain at a time, with no downtime. Here is how I chose the order, and why I left ten running on purpose.

Expert Opinion Aug 04, 2026

I ran one product's codebase for ten years and decided not to migrate it to a framework. That call saved roughly a year of frozen feature work and cost me things I did not see at the time. Here is the architecture I built instead, the score I invented to track it, and the three decisions I would make differently.

DevOps Jul 21, 2026

One headless Chrome render costs about 250 MB for roughly one second. Measured on a 7.6 GB box with zero swap. Here is how to install it without pulling in snap or breaking a shared Node version, the flags that matter on a server, and why the queue design matters more than the memory number.

Expert Opinion Jul 21, 2026

A one-line ticket asked me to switch thumbnails from PNG to SVG for better quality. Following it would have opened a stored XSS hole to fix a problem SVG does not even cause. The real cause was resolution, and the fix was one option. Here is how I checked the guess, and why I then did not build the better architecture I had already designed.