My grandmother hated throwing away the boxes things came in. There was a mountain of them in the storage closet by the kitchen that threatened to topple over every time we needed something from the closet. She argued that keeping the boxes was practical. There’d come a time when we’d need to move house or sell something, and the boxes, with their perfectly molded Styrofoam would keep their contents safe and presentable. ...
Every once in a while you find yourself caught between two warring bureaucratic processes. This was me back in 2024, while I was trying to finalize my immigration paperwork. I was missing a key document that only Cook County (the Chicago district I lived in at the time) could provide. The only problem was that their standard document format didn’t satisfy USCIS’s specific requirements, and I was quickly running out of time. ...
I recently saw a video from the Thinking Machines folk where the speaker was being corrected in real time as she spoke. “It’s pronounced ah-sai-yee” it quipped as she struggled with the word for the purported superfood berry she had for breakfast. In a way, it was cool to see an AI actively listen and steer a human to saying the “right thing”. But it got me thinking; is being right the point of everyday communication? ...
I started freelancing this year. This has meant jumping between unfamiliar codebases and getting productive as quickly as possible. A year ago this process entailed scouring through READMEs and directly pairing with a more veteran engineer to further familiarize myself with the codebase. Today, the process couldn’t be more different. I prompt an agent to walk me through general architecture, set up my local build environments and I’m often opening a PR within the first few hours of work. ...
In a past job, I broke networking within my first week of starting. The change? A single line commit that added a customer domain to a reverse proxy control loop that directed traffic to a specific server. api.somecompany.com, api.anotherfancynewcompany.ai { reverse_proxy http://localhost:4200 } At a glance, this code is legible, it should work; we’re manually proxying traffic from two domains to a locally running instance. A passing caddy validate run further verifies this. ...
The other day, I was working on translating data from a file into json to visualize the results. Easy enough, given that this was an operation I’d done countless times in the past. Still, I blanked. After spending months delegating all coding related tasks to an agent, I’d completely lost the muscle memory of a simple fs.readFileSync call. I ended up sheepishly reaching for Claude, which wrote the function in more time than past me would have taken. ...
Who am I, if not what I do? This was the question that haunted me at the start of the year. I began 2025 willingly unemployed, which was more uncomfortable than I’d imagined. Growing up in Asia, I’d been conditioned to believe that “a life well-lived” followed a clear rubric: education, career, family, being a “good person”. But who am I, bereft of that plan? If not in relation to someone else, and to a job? I work, therefore I am. ...
In Pulumi, stacks can separate an infrastructure build by environment or by more granular concern. In a recent setup I worked on, we went with the latter approach. One stack handled compute, another handled networking and a third managed global artifacts like container images. Given that Pulumi stacks are all about independent interoperable units, the stack differentiation helped us reason about our infrastructure as separate areas of concern. Until it didn’t. ...
In a previous role, I worked on establishing an observability stack using OpenTelemetry (OTel) which mostly involved setting up instances of OTel collector to run across a distributed network. The main goal of this effort was to decouple data collection from data export, to more reliably gather data from various services for export. In the simplest of setups, logs, and metrics can be sent directly to Grafana Cloud via an OTLP (OTel Protocol) exporter. An OTLP exporter is the component that sends your telemetry data from the OTel Collector to a backend like Grafana. Exporters generally handle authentication, and batching and can be configured for HTTP or gRPC transport. Essentially, they act as the bridge between your application’s telemetry and your monitoring platform. ...
Across the startups that I’ve worked at, a recurring theme has been using Nomad and eventually migrating off of it. In one of them, which you might already be fairly acquainted with, Nomad was an initial iteration at constraint-based deployments enabling regional rollouts and seamless rescheduling across a fleet during maintenance events. For a company like Fly.io that gives customers the ability to schedule apps in different regions, an orchestrator is fundamental to the user experience. That said, many companies (at least several that I’ve worked at) rely on orchestrators like Nomad for deployments. In these instances, Nomad is overkill and often complicate the deployment experience. ...