Writing

Technical posts on distributed systems, backend patterns, and things that broke in production so you don't have to find out the hard way.

You Pin Your Versions and Still Need a Lock File. Here's Why. Version pinning controls one layer of a problem that has four. Lock files solve the other three.

10 min May 23, 2026

Authorization Is a Graph Problem (And Most Teams Solve It Like a Table Problem) From Zanzibar to Cedar — a structural tour of how modern authorization actually works, where each approach breaks, and which tradeoffs you're really making

18 min May 22, 2026

Your Agent Runs Code You Didn't Write: A Field Guide to Runtime Isolation Containers, microVMs, OS sandboxes, and WASM — what each actually enforces at the kernel level, and a decision tree for choosing the right one

16 min May 21, 2026

Your System Can't Survive Its Own Control Plane The availability pattern hiding in every major outage — and the design decisions that make or break it

14 min May 20, 2026

Everything Your Agent Reads Is Code Why cloning a repo, installing a skill, or opening a PR can silently compromise your machine — and the architectural flaw connecting all of it

18 min May 18, 2026

Tool Descriptions Are Code: MCP Security from First Principles Why a protocol backed by Anthropic accumulated 16 CVEs in its first year, and what that means for anyone connecting tools to an LLM

16 min May 17, 2026

Your AI Agent's 'Plugin' Is Just a Markdown File (And That's the Point) How Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex extend their agents -- and why the business strategy matters more than the implementation

14 min May 16, 2026

Five Ways to Make a Message Survive The message isn't the hard part. Keeping the context alive is.

22 min May 15, 2026

TLS 1.3 Removed Half the Protocol. The Web Got More Secure. How removing cipher suites, round trips, and decades of backwards compatibility made every connection on the Internet safer

18 min May 13, 2026

So You Want to Build an Idempotent Service From f(f(x)) = f(x) to production middleware — three strategies for not doing things twice

15 min May 11, 2026

You're Already Building a Workflow Engine How durable execution replaces your state machines, retry loops, and reconciliation crons — and the new problems it creates

16 min May 10, 2026

Exactly-Once Is a Lie (Sort Of) Why two smart people can disagree about whether exactly-once is possible — and both be right