"What" is what matters
The how is being automated. The why won't last as long as you think. What to build — that's the question that stays yours.
Latest Posts
Context is Everything: You Only Get What You Paid For
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.
The problem disappeared
Everyone's saying AI killed Tailwind's traffic funnel. That's the symptom. The real problem: AI dissolved the thing Tailwind Plus was selling.
Half the Internet Broken for 14 Hours - October 2025 AWS Outage
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's Distributed Monolith: 42 Regions That Failed as One
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.
The Next.js Middleware Bypass: How a Single HTTP Header Broke Authentication Everywhere
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.
The shaky foundation of our time - one year after Facebook's major outage
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.