Writing

Notes on leadership, engineering, and making things.

• leadership

  6 min · June 11, 2026

  What Does a Founding Engineer Actually Do? The 'Founding' Is Misleading

  Founding engineer is one of the most sought-after technical roles of 2025. But most people get it wrong: they are not a founder, and the job is not mostly writing code. Backed by industry data, here is what the role really involves.

• leadership

  17 min · June 6, 2026

  Should a CTO Write Code? Stop Asking the Wrong Question

  Should a CTO write code or not? The question itself is wrong. How the role changes with the company's stage, when to touch the keyboard, and when to stay away.

• engineering

  7 min · June 5, 2026

  Is PHP Dead?

  Taking the old "Is PHP dead?" question and walking it through PHP's history and its technical turns, this piece argues that it is still a living, growing language.

• engineering

  6 min · January 11, 2026

  Data Integrity in Distributed Systems and the Debezium Call

  Trying to keep several databases consistent, I hit polling, spaghetti code, and the dual write curse. The fix was to stop asking the database 'what changed' and listen to its log instead: CDC and Debezium.

• engineering

  6 min · January 11, 2026

  Mattermost's 10,000 Message Limit and How I Moved to Matrix

  One morning Mattermost put our team's memory behind a 10,000 message wall. I weighed the options honestly, moved to the Matrix protocol, and wrote my own tool for the migration.

• leadership

  12 min · November 20, 2025

  The Prototype Illusion and the Vasa Syndrome

  Why a working prototype is not a product: the vitamin versus painkiller test, design over-engineering, and when to hold or cross the line on demands.

• engineering

  6 min · October 1, 2025

  AI Is Not a Cheat Code, It's the New Power Steering

  Every time a new tool arrived, someone called it 'not real programming'. AI is in that seat now. But the point was never the tool, it is who holds the wheel.

• maker

  6 min · September 1, 2025

  Building a Desktop App with Wails in 2025

  Notes from shipping a cross-platform desktop application with Go and web tech.