Infrastructure Engineering: Systems, Networking, Databases & the Internet
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Network architecture, internet protocols, database and systems design, and the infrastructure engineering decisions that determine whether real production systems hold up under load.
Gross Risk vs Net Risk: A Technology Leader’s Guide to Why Freezing Change Doesn’t Make Legacy Systems Safer
I have been parachuted into a number of troubled technology environments during my career, and they usually shared the same characteristics: too many incidents, nervous business stakeholders, old technology, fragile architecture, and a technology team that had gradually lost confidence in its own ability to change anything. One of the first things I learned was […]
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Why Technology Teams Resist New Technology and What Actually Gets Them to Adopt It
Every technologist eventually meets the same moment. The team agrees that an existing technology has reached the end of its useful life. Everyone agrees the replacement is the right direction. And then, month after month, the team keeps building on the old platform anyway. This is not usually laziness, and it is not usually stubbornness […]
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Why Nothing Is Future Proof: The Infinite Game in Technology Strategy
Every vendor pitch eventually arrives at the same promise. The platform is future proof. The architecture is built to last. The investment you make today will still be paying off in ten years, so buy now and stop worrying about tomorrow. It is a comforting sentence, and it is also completely false, and I think […]
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Has Microsoft’s Moat Been Breached? What Is Left of the Enterprise Fortress?
1. Microsoft the company is doing perfectly well, and that is not the question I am asking Let me kill the easiest objection to this article before anyone reaches for it, because the objection is entirely reasonable and entirely beside the point. Microsoft 365 Commercial cloud revenue grew 14% in Microsoft’s latest reported quarter, paid […]
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Windows Server Is Ageing Technology, and Even Microsoft Knows It
For decades, enterprises treated operating system selection as an application requirement: if the application required Windows, you installed Windows, and if it required Linux, you installed Linux. I think that logic has expired. In a modern enterprise built around cloud, elasticity, automated pipelines, containers and disposable infrastructure, the question should not be which server operating […]
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Microsoft moved on from Active Directory. Should you?
1. The scar tissue Every organisation of a certain age carries an Active Directory scar. It usually formed the same way. A single forest was stood up in the early 2000s to solve Windows authentication, and over two decades it quietly absorbed every identity problem the business ever had. Linux boxes joined the domain because […]
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Software Engineering : When Building Beats Buying (And When It Doesn’t)
1. A disclosed bias I spent twelve years writing algorithmic trading software before any of the cloud infrastructure work. That is where the bias actually comes from, not from EC2. Trading systems taught me that being quick and being good are not separate goals you trade off against each other, they are the same requirement […]
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Cloudflare Missed Its Market: The Internet Needs a Trust Layer, Not another Security Tool
Ask ten CIOs what Cloudflare does and you will get ten different answers, ranging across DDoS protection, CDN, zero trust networking, DNS, WAF, reverse proxy, and bot management, and every single one of them will be correct, which is precisely the problem. When a product can be described ten different ways by sophisticated buyers, that […]
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The Undergraduate Who Broke a 40 Year Assumption About Hash Tables and what this means for Memory
1. A Side Project That Ended a Conjecture In 2023, Andrew Krapivin was an undergraduate at Rutgers University reading a paper on his own time, for fun, that his professor MartÃn Farach-Colton had co-authored two years earlier. The paper was called “Tiny Pointers”, and it described a new kind of memory reference object that could […]
Read more →How to Debounce Search in JavaScript, React, and Angular
Why debouncing is one of the highest value patterns in responsive web development Most developers have built a search box that fires an API call on every keystroke and at some point felt the full weight of that decision. The network tab fills with hundreds of requests, the backend slows under the load, the UI […]
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Bulk Domain Availability Check via CLI (Bash + Python Only)
You have a list of 50 domain name ideas. Maybe you are launching a product, picking a brand, or trying to find something halfway decent that has not already been squatted. Whatever the reason, typing them one at a time into a registrar search box is not a workflow, it is punishment. This post shows […]
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Security Vibing: Why Teams Keep Sacrificing to the Risk Gods Instead of Managing Real Risk
Something interesting happens inside large organisations when a new technology appears and nobody is quite sure how dangerous it is: people start sacrificing things. A feature gets disabled, a setting gets locked down, and a capability gets removed. Another approval step gets inserted into the process, or someone quietly updates a policy. Everyone feels slightly […]
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