15 essays and counting! Explore the archive or browse by topic.
The Trap of Convenience March 2023. GPT-4 launched, and like many developers, I saw the potential immediately. Not the hype - the actual utility. I’d been writing Go for over a decade. Built distributed systems, debugged production nightmares, made every mistake worth making. I knew what good code looked like. But GPT was convenient. Why spend 20 minutes reading documentation when I could get an answer in 30 seconds? Why think through edge cases when AI could generate them? Why architect when I could prompt? ...
The Message That Should Have Been Obvious The LinkedIn message came from someone claiming to be a Paxos recruiter. For context, Paxos is a legitimate, well-funded blockchain infrastructure company. The kind of place where a recruitment message wouldn’t be weird. But I was curious. How much effort do these scammers actually put in? So I engaged. A few messages back and forth. They mentioned a “first round” that would be the usual call to discuss the role. I made it clear I wasn’t particularly interested in phone screening right now - too busy, maybe another time. ...
This is part of the series Startup that Failed . Infrastructure as Code: Why It’s Non-Negotiable Start with this rule: If you’re touching AWS console to create resources, you’re doing it wrong. Every resource goes through Terraform. IAM roles, security groups, RDS instances, S3 buckets, EKS clusters - everything. No exceptions. This isn’t about following best practices. It’s about three concrete problems: 1. Reproducibility. You will need to rebuild your infrastructure. Whether it’s disaster recovery, creating new environments, or (in my case) rebranding, you’ll need to recreate everything. With Terraform, it’s terraform apply. Without it, you’re clicking through AWS console trying to remember what you configured six months ago. ...
This is part of the series Startup that Failed . The Moment I Knew Month 6. I was debugging a HIPAA compliance issue at 2 AM that would affect maybe three users. And I remember thinking: This isn’t going to work. Not the bug. The whole thing. The startup. The vision. The 18-month plan I’d laid out so carefully. I knew. Deep in that part of your brain that’s honest when the rest of you isn’t. I knew the math didn’t work. I knew the market didn’t care. I knew I was building something impressive that nobody wanted. ...
This is part of the series Startup that Failed . The Irony of the Minimum Viable Product Here’s a fun exercise: Take the definition of MVP ~ Minimum Viable Product ~ and tell me which word matters most. If you said Product, congratulations, you’re me 18 months ago. If you said Viable, you’re getting warmer but still wrong. The answer, painfully obvious in retrospect, is Minimum. But minimum is boring. Minimum doesn’t impress investors. Minimum doesn’t showcase your technical prowess. Minimum feels like giving up before you even start. ...