Writing
Technical writing & engineering notes.
Articles, architecture notes, project logs, and engineering reflections. Filter by type, search by keyword, or browse by tag.
Upgrading Production DNS by Never Touching the Live Node
Two Pi-holes, a floating IP, and a major-version upgrade on the box that resolves everything in the house. The trick is that the safe procedure and the risky procedure look identical from the outside.
The Network Is the Layer I Documented Last
My homelab has an IPAM, metrics from every access point, and a config file for the network that is entirely placeholders — with a warning at the top admitting it.
The Outage Was Never the Thing I Was Debugging
A homelab-wide outage at 01:45. I blamed the reverse proxy, then the IPS, then the SSO layer. The root cause was a network port down at the switch — everything I suspected was a symptom.
Daily Note: Shipping the first blog post from my phone
The meta post. Stood up this blog, wrote this from the couch on my phone. Quick Note works.
Daily Note: TIL — Polly SSML <mark> tags
Polly's SSML <mark> tags emit timing events over the stream. Useful for synchronizing on-screen captions to voice playback.
Daily Note: Debugging a Production API Flow
Integration test green, staging green, prod failing for 1% of callers. The bug was in a place I would never have guessed.
Building Voice Integrations on Top of Async Chatbots
What breaks when you front an async chatbot with Amazon Connect + Lex, and how to keep latency, barge-in, and context handoff sane.
What I Learned Designing Omnichannel Backend Integrations
Shared intent schema, eventually-consistent conversation state, and why the channel should be the last thing your backend knows about.
From Backend Engineer to Technical Leader
What actually changed when I stopped being the one writing the code — and what I wish someone had told me in year four.
How I Think About Secure Backend Integrations
A working mental model for auth, secrets, scopes, and blast radius — built from scars, not books.
Architecture Note: When to pick SQS FIFO over a DB queue
A decision framework I use when the team reaches for a Postgres-backed queue by default.
Homelab Notes: Running Services Behind Traefik
My current homelab setup, why I moved off nginx-proxy, and what broke along the way.