Why defaults matter more
Most codebases grow in directions their authors never anticipated. The pressure to optimize early is real, but constraints often produce more elegant solutions than freedom ever could.
Recent writing
- What makes code readable · 25 minutes ago · 54,086 reads
- Ten years of terminal tooling · 24 minutes ago
- The maintenance burden of frameworks · 8 hours ago
What makes code readable
Performance optimization is a tempting distraction. Every line of code that exists to optimize one specific case is a line that must be maintained and understood forever.
From the archive
Distributed systems fail in ways that are hard to predict. After years of debugging production incidents, certain patterns keep recurring. This post explores a few.
About this site
These are my notes on building reliable, readable, maintainable systems. Interested in clarity over cleverness.
Thoughts on design. Updated sporadically.
Elsewhere
Occasional writing on design topics. Past essays here.