Essays on software, systems, and the craft of engineering.https://offbeatengineer.com/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/the-whole-and-the-part/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/the-whole-and-the-part/Every great leap lifts the whole and drops some of the parts. AI is the next one.Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/what-is-what-matters/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/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.Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/context-engineering-llms/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/context-engineering-llms/Everyone's chasing the perfect prompt. The real lever is what else goes into the window.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/tailwind-product-obsolescence/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/tailwind-product-obsolescence/Everyone's saying AI killed Tailwind's traffic funnel. That's the symptom. The real problem: AI dissolved the thing Tailwind Plus was selling.Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/aws-october-2025-outage/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/aws-october-2025-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.Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/google-cloud-outage-june-2025/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/google-cloud-outage-june-2025/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.Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/nextjs-middleware-bypass/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/nextjs-middleware-bypass/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.Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://offbeatengineer.com/blog/shaky-foundation/https://offbeatengineer.com/blog/shaky-foundation/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.Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT