Insights - Essays, Guides, and Technical Deep Dives

What I Actually Learned Leaving the Bank

Independent work isn't 'more freedom' the way Twitter sells it. It's a different kind of constraint. Here's what shifted when I left a global bank to build my own studio.

Apr 28, 2026

technical·11 min

Claude Opus 4.7 with 1M Context: What Actually Changes

1M tokens isn't a marketing number - it changes how you architect retrieval. My RAG pipeline got 3x simpler and 2x more accurate. The cost math also shifted in interesting ways.

Apr 22, 2026

technical·10 min

Next.js 16 in Production: A Three-Month Field Report

I shipped three production sites on Next.js 16 in Q1 2026. Build times dropped, hydration mismatches got better, and I finally stopped hating the App Router.

Apr 15, 2026

"RAG is Dead" - and Why That's Half True

Every six months someone declares RAG dead. They're wrong, but the way RAG is implemented in most production systems IS dead. Here's the difference.

Apr 8, 2026

technical·12 min

Spring Boot 3.2 on GraalVM: When It's Worth It

I shipped a Spring Boot service compiled to a native image at TD Bank. Cold-start went from 8 seconds to 80 milliseconds. The build time went from 30 seconds to 6 minutes. Whether that's a win depends entirely on your shape of load.

Apr 2, 2026

technical·10 min

Kafka vs. EventBridge vs. Pub/Sub: A Practical Comparison

Three years ago every event-driven system used Kafka. Today the answer is more nuanced. Cloud-native event buses have closed the gap on most workloads, but Kafka still wins for the workloads that matter.

Mar 26, 2026

essays·13 min

AI Agents in Production: What 18 Months Taught Me

I've shipped four agent-based features in production since late 2024. Three of them are still running. The one that isn't taught me the most.

Mar 20, 2026

technical·9 min

Postgres as Everything: The 2026 Reality

Vector search? Postgres has pgvector. Job queue? Postgres + SKIP LOCKED. Cache? Postgres unlogged tables. Search? Postgres FTS. The boring database keeps eating the modern stack.

Mar 12, 2026

guides·7 min

The 1099 Engineer's Finance Stack

Nobody warns you about the operational overhead of independent work. Invoicing, taxes, bookkeeping, contracts, insurance - the meta-work eats your week if you don't automate. This is what I run.

Mar 4, 2026

essays·10 min

OpenAI vs. Anthropic in 2026: My Working Mental Model

After two years of running both providers in production, I have a clear picture of where each wins. The frontier-model gap is closer than it was, but the products around the models are genuinely different.

Feb 25, 2026

Why MCP Is the Quiet Revolution Nobody's Talking About

MCP standardizes how AI clients connect to data sources and tools. It's been shipping for over a year. Here's why it matters more than the next benchmark bump.

Feb 18, 2026

Vercel Fluid Compute: Six Months of Real Use

Fluid compute changes the cost model for serverless functions that mostly wait on databases or AI APIs. I've been running production workloads on it. Here's what's true.

Feb 4, 2026

Stop Writing Microservices

Microservices are the wrong default for most companies. The architecture I keep coming back to is the modular monolith - the same Spring Boot codebase, organized strictly along domain boundaries, deployed as one.

Jan 22, 2026

technical·10 min

AI Coding Tools at the End of 2025: A Working Engineer's Verdict

I've spent more time with AI coding tools in 2025 than I have with any IDE in my career. The differences between tools are significant and often misreported. Here's how I actually use each.

Dec 18, 2025

technical·12 min

Fintech Architecture Patterns That Actually Survive Regulators

Fintech architecture content online is mostly written by people who've never been audited. Here's what regulators actually ask about and how I architect to pass.

Nov 30, 2025

Kubernetes: When It's the Right Choice (And When You're Just LARPing)

Kubernetes is a phenomenal tool for the right problem. It is also, in my experience, the most over-adopted tool in our industry. Here's a sharper decision framework.

Nov 12, 2025

technical·9 min

React Server Components in 2025: The Honest Take

React Server Components are now the default in Next.js. The mental model is genuinely different from anything React had before. Here's what I've learned shipping them.

Oct 28, 2025

guides·8 min

The Observability Stack I Run in 2025

For early-stage companies, modern observability is over-priced for what most teams need. Here's a leaner stack that gets 90% of the value at 20% of the cost.

Oct 8, 2025

guides·9 min

Hiring Your First Engineer as a Founder

Most founders hire their first engineer wrong. They optimize for skill match instead of context-handling. Here's the framework I walk founders through.

Sep 19, 2025

technical·11 min

How I Cut Chargeback Fraud 73% on a Fintech Project

Three months on a fintech engagement, three rule-engine refactors, and a small AI scoring layer. Here's how the numbers actually moved.

Aug 30, 2025

essays·7 min

Anthropic's MCP Launch: Five Takeaways from a Skeptic

When Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol in late 2024, I thought it was a Claude-specific play. A year of using it for client work changed my mind.

Aug 4, 2025

Edge Databases: Where the Hype Meets Reality

Edge databases promise low latency from anywhere. The reality is more nuanced. Here's where they actually win and where they cost more than they save.

Jul 15, 2025

AI Summer 2025: What Actually Progressed

Mid-year stocktake on AI capabilities, costs, tools, and architectures. The real progress isn't where the headlines are.

Jun 30, 2025

Fractional CTO: When the Model Actually Works

Fractional CTO has become a buzzword. Most arrangements fail because nobody defined what 'fractional' means. Here's the version that actually delivers.

May 22, 2025

Groq vs. OpenAI vs. Anthropic for Inference: Speed, Cost, and Quality

Latency-sensitive workloads need Groq. Frontier capability needs Anthropic or OpenAI. Cost-sensitive workloads have a third answer. I've benchmarked all three.

Apr 30, 2025

technical·9 min

Spring Boot 3.2: The Features I Actually Use

Spring Boot 3.2 shipped a lot. Most teams are using maybe 20% of it. Here's the 20% that's worth knowing about.

Mar 15, 2025

essays·7 min

The End of Frontend Frameworks (Sort Of)

Nobody's debating React vs Vue vs Svelte anymore. The action moved to: which runtime, which deployment model, which AI integration. Here's what changed.

Feb 28, 2025

DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen - When Open Models Win

Open-weights models closed enough of the gap with frontier closed-source models that real production workloads now make sense on them. Here's where I deploy them.

Feb 12, 2025

technical·6 min

Cursor vs. Claude Code: How I Decide

Cursor and Claude Code overlap but aren't substitutes. After months of using both, I have a clear sense of when each wins.

Jan 22, 2025

Shipping for Two Fractional-CTO Clients in 2024: What I Learned

Two clients, very different stacks, very different problems, lots of overlap in what failure modes I saw. Year-end retrospective.

Dec 30, 2024

The Real Cost of Running Claude in Production

I track every penny of Claude API spend across my projects. Here's the breakdown of what costs what, and where the savings are.

Dec 15, 2024

guides·8 min

Remote Team Rituals That Actually Work

Most remote-team advice is generic. After running engineering pods at TD, DBS, and now my own clients across timezones, I have stronger opinions about what works.

Nov 26, 2024

Vector Databases: The 2024 Shakeout

The vector DB market exploded in 2023, consolidated in 2024. Here's where each player stands and which one I'd pick for what.

Nov 8, 2024

guides·7 min

Instrumentation Before Optimization

Half the projects I get pulled into are 'we need to optimize X.' Half of those don't actually have data showing X is the bottleneck. Instrumentation is the first move.

Oct 22, 2024

guides·7 min

The Zero-to-Launch Stack I Use in 2024

Same client request comes up multiple times a year. Here's the stack I use for fast, defensible MVPs.

Oct 4, 2024

playbooks·11 min

Monolith to Microservices: When (and How) to Make the Move

Don't do a big-bang migration. Don't migrate for the wrong reasons. Don't migrate without instrumentation. Here's the playbook that actually ships.

Sep 15, 2024

essays·7 min

I Stopped Using ORMs (Mostly)

ORMs feel productive in the early days and become a tax later. Here's when I still reach for one and when I write SQL directly.

Aug 28, 2024

What I Learned From My First Production Incident

An anonymized retrospective on the first big incident I drove. The technical fix mattered less than the communication and rollback discipline.

Aug 12, 2024

Why Banks Pay So Much for Software (and Why It's Justified)

I spent five years inside large banks. People always asked why their software costs so much. The answer surprised me - most of it is fundamentally well-spent.

Jul 30, 2024

guides·8 min

AI Product Design Patterns That Don't Suck

Six patterns I use when integrating AI into existing products. The ones that work feel like a feature; the ones that don't feel like a chatbot bolted on the side.

Jul 15, 2024

essays·5 min

Linear vs. Jira in 2024

I've watched teams improve dramatically just by switching their issue tracker. Linear vs. Jira is one of those decisions that's actually about culture, not features.

Jun 25, 2024

The React 19 Upgrade Experience

React 19 brought useTransition improvements, the new use() hook, and the Activity component. The migration was smoother than I feared. Here's the breakdown.

Jun 8, 2024

essays·6 min

Writing as a Developer Marketing Channel

Most developer marketing advice is bad. Writing isn't bad. Here's why technical writing converts better than 'thought leadership.'

May 20, 2024