Most engineers obsess over finding magic prompts. The real skill is context engineering - understanding that LLMs are stateless machines that only see what you put in their context window, and learning to control that window systematically.
A race condition in DynamoDB's DNS system triggered a 14-hour cascading failure across AWS. The root cause reveals a fundamental distributed systems anti-pattern—and uncomfortable questions about the economics of cloud resilience.
Google operates 42 cloud regions. On June 12, 2025, they all crashed simultaneously. That's not distributed infrastructure—it's a monolith with extra steps. The outage reveals how the industry systematically builds the appearance of distribution while eliminating every blast radius boundary.
A CVSS 9.1 vulnerability let attackers bypass all Next.js middleware auth with one curl command. The real story isn't the bug—it's how Vercel's edge computing business model created a security hole that took three weeks and two failed patches to fix.
A reflection on tech infrastructure fragility—from Facebook's 6-hour outage to left-pad—and what it means to build on foundations we don't control.