Hello, world

Why I'm starting a notebook, and what's going in it.

I’ve kept private notes on every project I’ve worked on for about a decade. Most of them aren’t worth sharing. A few are. This is where the few go.

The format will be short. I want to capture specific things — the kind of detail I’d want if I were searching for it six months from now — rather than essays on what software engineering is supposed to be.

What I’ll write about

  • Postmortems, lightly anonymized.
  • Tools I’ve replaced and why.
  • Performance puzzles, especially the ones whose answer surprised me.
  • Occasional opinions, marked as such.

Here’s an arbitrary chart, mostly to verify the pipeline:

320 200 100 0 ms

w1 w3 w5 w7 48 ms

p99 query latency across the optimization sprint.

That’s it for the kickoff. Real content soon.