Latest writing
First Principles: LLM Agents (Most of Yours Are Chatbots Wearing a Hat)
LLM agent design is buried under framework worship, multi-agent fantasies, and vector-DB orthodoxy. Strip it back to what is provably true and only six things survive. Most of the architecture teams reach for is a chatbot wearing a hat.
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Dependency cooldowns considered harmful: a first-principles analysis
Dependency cooldowns promise supply-chain safety by hiding releases for N days, but the math shows they guarantee extended CVE exposure while catching only a narrow band of attacks that lockfiles and staging already...
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First Principles: Distributed Systems (Most of Yours Should Not Exist)
Distributed systems thinking is drowning in inherited wisdom — microservices by default, horizontal scaling as a reflex, eventual consistency as a catchphrase. Strip it down to six irreducible truths and most of that...
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First Principles: Data Engineering and ETLs
ETL is not a law of nature, it is a convention born from constraints that no longer exist. Strip data engineering down to its irreducible truths and rebuild it from scratch. What emerges is a discipline centered on...
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First Principles: DevOps
Strip away the Kubernetes hype, the “DevOps Engineer” job titles, and the cargo-culted CI/CD pipelines. What’s actually true about DevOps when you reason from first principles? Five irreducible truths, six design...
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First Principles: Software Design
Strip away the design patterns, the SOLID principles, and the architecture astronautics. What’s actually true about software design when you reason from fundamentals? Five irreducible truths, three reconstruction...
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First Principles: Software Observability
Everyone knows observability means logs, metrics, and traces. But what if you strip away the vendor marketing, the inherited conventions, and the cargo-culted dashboards? What’s actually true? A first-principles...
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Taming Your Dev Chaos with direnv, .env, and .envrc (Plus a Sneak Peek at mise-en-place)
Stop manually juggling env vars like a clown — learn how direnv auto-magically handles your dev environments with .env and .envrc files. Includes a sick custom layout uv function for Python projects and a teaser on...
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Git usage guidelines for team collaboration
Suggestions on how to use a code repository with git for teams.
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Remove big files from a git repository
Remove large blobs from your git repository history