A Guardrail Only Humans Enforce Isn’t One
MongoDB won’t stop you querying a collection that doesn’t exist, or storing mismatched documents side by side. That’s by design, and it has a cost.
Acronyms, Collisions, and the Cost of Not Asking
I promised a follow-up to a post about tech vocabulary,[1] and this is it. That one argued that dramatic words and vague words fail the same way: they carry attitude where information should be. I…
The Blast Radius Was Four Rows
A while back I read an incident report that described the “blast radius” of a “catastrophic” data issue. I kept reading, looking for the part where something exploded. The actual damage: four rows in a…
I Called Myself Dumb in a Code Comment. I Was Wrong About the Cursor.
I went looking through an old reconciliation script this week, the kind you write once for a quarter-end reconciliation and forget about, and I found a note from my past self. Right above a cursor,…
“The Numbers Are Wild”: Anatomy of a LinkedIn Tech Hype Post
A post showed up in my LinkedIn feed last week. It had all the hallmarks: short punchy sentences, each on their own line. Dramatic pauses between claims. A number so impressive it demanded an emoji…
The Progress Bar That Goes Backwards: A Jetpack Boost Source Code Archaeology
You click “Regenerate Critical CSS.” The progress bar crawls forward: 20%, 30%, 40%. Then it drops to 20%. Climbs back to 50%. Drops to 35%. Eventually it hits 100%, and you exhale. Then it starts…