System Architecture

This post annotates a talk I gave on March 23, 2025 at the first ATmosphere Conference in Seattle, working toward thinking together about bringing vulnerable people into the center of our work and building out viable vernacular institutions and economies for new networks.

Or: why test-first development is not the same as test-driven development

Explore service granularity tradeoffs: when to split or unite microservices: friction, QoS, scalability, and more.

I was interviewed by Inc magazine for almost two hours where we covered a lot of great topics for entrepreneurs but almost none of it made it into the weird hit piece they published, however since …

Pythonistas Hate This One Weird Trick

APIs are really useful for pulling in data from different sources for analysis in tools like Datasette or spreadsheets. However, APIs are often hard to build and often require writing specialized servers which then need to be deployed and maintained. What if this could be as easy as deploying a static website?

In a move that will absolutely not over-excite anyone, nor lead to any heated arguments, [needleful] posits that their C Plus Prolog (C+P for short) programming language is the best possible langua…

Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the internet, and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, … Continue reading →

From simple object storage to sophisticated table management, builders have always shaped S3's evolution. Andy Warfield discusses why making complex systems simple remains our north star at AWS.

With help from Kubernetes, Golang and Kafka, Slack's crontab drives 2,000 tasks an hour. Monster Scale Summit had all the details.

Organize all your web resources in one place, and work more productively across Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Atlassian, Asana and ClickUp etc

Are you mixing up privacy, security, and anonymity? Don't worry, it's more common than you might think! In this week's video we break down each term, so you can make educated decisions on what tools are best for you.

A deep dive where we unexpectedly discover how WebSockets cost us $1M/year in AWS spend and the quest for an efficient high-bandwidth, low-latency IPC.

Weeknotes 330: Building on last week's claim for embodied intelligence in robotics, this week's topic is immersive living intelligence, triggered by the new Amy Webb trend report. And many more.

The other day a mechanical engineer introduced me to the Hierarchy of Controls (HoC), an important concept in workplace safety. 1 (source) To protect people from hazards, system designers should seek to use the most effective controls available. This means elimination over substitution, substitution over engineering controls, etc. Can we use the Hierarchy of Controls in software engineering? Software environments are different than physical environments, but maybe there are some ideas worth extracting.

WireGuard: fast, modern, secure VPN tunnel

Exploration of using mechanisms provided by Elixir/OTP to build LLM powered applications

If you want one terminal that can be used anywhere, then the arrival of Warp for Windows is good news. David Eastman kicks the tires.

Selecting the right base image is crucial for securing Java applications in containerized environments.

Get started with the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

QPS out, depth in. DeepSearch is the new norm. Find answers through read-search-reason loops. Learn what it is and how to build it.

My hottest take is that multi-agents are a broken concept and should be avoided at all cost. My only caveat is PID controllers; A multi agent system that does a 3-step process that looks something like **Plan, Act, Verify** in a loop. That can work. Everything else is a devious plan to sell dev tools.

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