What is the blockchain and how it can be used for good — At its heart, a blockchain is a linked list. Each item in the list — called a block — contains three pieces of information: a timestamp, the data you’re trying to store in the block, and a hash of the previous item on the list. This links each block together…

Deciding what career path to follow: developer or DevOps — Let’s say you’re in the first few years of your tech career and you’re ready to make the jump to a full-time development-centric role. Maybe you’re part of an internship program where you’re exposed to a few different roles, or you’ve just finished up a code boot camp, and you’re…

The good and bad of tech positions at big firms — I’ve spent my tech career alternating between large and small companies, from very large ones like Comcast and Capital One to small local shops you’ve never heard of. …

There’s a lot to know about databases, so let's start with the basics — There’s a lot to know about databases. They’re complex mission-critical applications that sometimes require specialized subject matter experts to maintain them, but that doesn’t mean that they’re some kind of magic black box either. …

A few overlooked aspects of working with databases — Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some deep-diving into databases as part of my day-job effort to migrate our existing Postgres 9x databases to something more recent, like Postgres 13. As an SRE I don’t typically have much exposure to the database layer of the applications that I…

The fundamentally broken AWS Database Migration Service — Look, I get it. Databases are rarely sexy. No one really likes talking about indexes, or data de-normalization, or stuff like that. But like it or not databases have a fundamental and important role to play in just about every modern application, whether those databases are large multi-region, multi-replica data…

An impassioned defense of “code smells” and why tech bloggers have gone insane — We’ve all seen the articles. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those ones. Simple, reductive headlines like “RECURSION IS BAD” or “WE NEED TO STOP USING IF/ELSE” from people who just discovered functional programming. And look, it's fine to have differing opinions about things, code styles included, but there’s…

Its 2AM on a Monday night. I’m sitting here at my desk while my wife and two kids fast asleep two floors above me. For the past three hours I’ve been aimlessly browsing the internet looking for a spark of inspiration. Craigslist, Angel.co, HackerNews, and even Quora have seen visits…

Sometimes I really hate being right. Less than two weeks ago I published an article called “Culture Doesn’t Matter”, in which I outlined a very simple idea: that company culture doesn’t matter unless its actively lived by the leadership. Then just a few days later, Basecamp-gate happens. For those of…