Deep dives into software, hardware, and the ideas reshaping how we build things.
When HashiCorp Changed the Rules August 2023 feels like a long time ago in infrastructure circles, but that’s when HashiCorp made the move that shattered the implicit covenant with its community. The shift from Mozilla Public License 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1 for Terraform wasn’t framed as a restriction at first. Read the announcement …
Continue reading “OpenTofu 1.9: The Terraform Fork That Actually Matters Now”
The Database That Arrived Without Fanfare If you were paying close attention at re:Invent 2024, you caught AWS’s announcement of Aurora DSQL. If you weren’t, you’re in good company. This one didn’t get the headline treatment of some flashier launches, which is precisely why it’s worth examining carefully. Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL …
The Pattern Nobody Wanted to See Coming If you’ve been paying attention to developer communities over the past few months, you’ve probably encountered the term “vibe coding.” It entered the lexicon in early 2025 when Andrej Karpathy’s Original Vibe Coding Post described a specific approach to software development: delegating nearly all code generation to large …
The Shift Nobody Fully Prepared For If you’ve been paying attention to the industry over the last two years, you’ve noticed something fundamental shifting beneath the surface of how we build and operate software systems. DevOps hasn’t disappeared. It’s being absorbed into something larger and more specialized. Platform engineering has moved from a boutique concern …
The Problem That Kept Us All Up at Night If you’ve spent more than a year running stateful workloads on Kubernetes, you know the specific flavor of pain that comes with resizing persistent volumes. The scenario plays out the same way almost every time: your database needs more disk space, or you realize your initial …
The Week Everything Almost Fell Apart In April 2025, the security industry experienced a moment of genuine panic that most of the broader tech world never noticed. MITRE Corporation, the nonprofit that has operated the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures program since its inception in 1999, publicly disclosed that its contract with CISA was set to …
The Starting Point: Why This Matters Now Six months ago, I would have told you that Cursor had effectively won the market for AI-assisted coding. The tool arrived early, executed well, and built a loyal following among developers who were tired of context-switching between their editor and ChatGPT. But something shifted in the last half-year. …
The Gap Between Announcements and Your Monthly Invoice Every November, the cloud industry holds its breath. AWS re:Invent delivers another round of price cuts, partnership announcements, and architectural improvements that sound transformative in keynotes but land differently when you’re staring at actual bills six months later. This year was no exception. Amazon announced further reductions …
The Hype Machine Ran at Full Throttle, But One Announcement Actually Landed AWS re:Invent 2024 felt like every other year: the keynote stage was packed with enough new services and feature announcements to keep three teams busy for six months. Most of it will fade into background noise by March. But somewhere in the firehose …
The 3 AM Wake-Up Call Three years ago, I got pulled out of bed at 3 AM because our checkout service was timing out. Not occasionally. Every single request. The postmortem revealed a cascade failure that started with a single slow database query in our inventory service, rippled through seven HTTP calls, and brought down …
Continue reading “Why We Ditched REST for gRPC (And When We Switched Back)”
