Expert Opinion Oct 05, 2026
Your AI agent and your newest engineer are stuck on the same problemA 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.
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Expert Opinion Sep 12, 2026
Migrating the heart of a live product in nine batchesI 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.
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Expert Opinion Sep 11, 2026
Why I still write PHP in 2026PHP 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.
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Expert Opinion Aug 18, 2026
I moved logic out of the database and took on a harder problem on purposeMoving 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.
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Expert Opinion Aug 13, 2026
Your business logic is hiding in your database, and nobody can see itA 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.
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Expert Opinion Aug 04, 2026
Ten years on one codebase, and what I would build differentlyI 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.
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