Technical insights and practical observations on software development, digital craft, and the evolving technology landscape. – Page 2

Expect content that balances technical insight with measured reflection, seasoned with just the right amount of humour. These ideas and observations refused to stay quietly in mind, now shared to spark meaningful discussions and fresh perspectives.

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The complete archive across all years—from hands-on infrastructure and tooling guides to opinionated takes on architecture, quality, and the forces reshaping the craft.

41 articles← First year·Blog topics →

Turbocharge development: the magic of SSH port forwarding

Security policies block database ports. Firewalls prevent external connections. Remote services remain inaccessible except through carefully controlled channels. SSH port forwarding creates encrypted tunnels that make distant services appear local—you connect to localhost whilst traffic routes securely to remote resources, maintaining security boundaries without compromising workflow efficiency.

9 April 2024 · 10 min read · SSH, Security, InfrastructureRead →

The platform team trap: building internal products nobody asked for

Platform teams start with a sensible promise: remove repeated toil so delivery teams can focus on customers. The trap appears when the platform grows its own roadmap, measures success by adoption, and becomes an internal product nobody is allowed to refuse.

5 February 2024 · 23 min read · Architecture, Industry, PatternsRead →

Streamlining local development with Dnsmasq

Testing on localhost hides entire categories of bugs—cookie scope issues, CORS policies, authentication flows that behave differently on real domains. These problems surface after deployment, when fixing them costs hours instead of minutes. Dnsmasq eliminates this gap by making local development behave like production, turning any custom domain into localhost whilst preserving domain-based security policies.

17 January 2024 · 9 min read · Infrastructure, Configuration, DevOpsRead →

SSH dotfiles: unlocking efficiency

Managing dozens of SSH connections means remembering complex hostnames, multiple keys, and elaborate commands you copy from text files. The .ssh/config file transforms this chaos into memorable aliases that map mental shortcuts to complete configurations, reducing cognitive load so you can focus on actual work rather than SSH incantations.

7 November 2023 · 7 min read · SSH, Configuration, Productivity, AutomationRead →

Dotfiles: why and how

Working on someone else's machine feels like writing with their hands—common commands fail, shortcuts vanish, and everything feels wrong. Dotfiles transform this by capturing your accumulated workflow optimisation in version-controlled configuration files, turning any terminal into your terminal within minutes rather than days of manual reconfiguration.

3 November 2023 · 11 min read · Configuration, Automation, ProductivityRead →

Downtime of uptime percentages, deciphering the impact

Understanding the real-world implications of uptime percentages is paramount for businesses and consumers alike. What might seem like minor decimal differences in uptime guarantees can translate to significant variations in service availability, impacting operations, customer experience, and bottom lines.

1 November 2023 · 10 min read · Infrastructure, Quality, DevOpsRead →

The greenfield delusion: why new projects feel productive and brownfield work is where value lives

Every rewrite pitch promises immaculate diagrams, fresh architecture, and no awkward compromises. Greenfield projects feel clean only because they have not met production yet, and the delusion starts when organisations mistake that early clarity for value and treat brownfield work as failure instead of stewardship.

23 October 2023 · 20 min read · Architecture, Industry, QualityRead →

cURL beyond GET: an HTTP toolkit you already have

curl offers around 257 command-line options, yet it is easy to use only a small handful of them in regular rotation. This article treats the familiar URL fetcher as a practical HTTP toolkit for debugging, scripting, and smoke tests.

2 October 2023 · 14 min read · Automation, Productivity, DevOpsRead →

Estimation theatre: the collective delusion nobody will abandon

Teams spend hours debating whether a story is a five or an eight, then watch the number become a roadmap date and a blame shield. Estimation theatre persists because organisations pretend uncertainty disappeared the moment a meeting produced a number.

11 September 2023 · 23 min read · Productivity, Industry, PatternsRead →

Leap seconds: the extra tick that breaks everything

Leap seconds are tiny corrections with large software consequences. This article explains why UTC occasionally gained an impossible second, how Linux, DNS, airline bookings, and distributed systems stumbled over it, and why standards bodies chose a different future.

14 August 2023 · 12 min read · Standards, Infrastructure, QualityRead →

Resume-driven architecture: when career incentives overwrite system needs

Resume-driven architecture happens when teams choose technology for marketability rather than fit. It is not individual vanity so much as an incentive problem built by hiring, promotion, hype, and weak technical governance.

24 July 2023 · 24 min read · Architecture, Industry, StandardsRead →

Aliases and shell functions: building your personal command vocabulary

The average developer types the same handful of commands hundreds of times a day, with the same flags, in the same order. The shell has two small features for shortening that vocabulary without losing any of its expressiveness, and they take an afternoon to learn properly.

19 June 2023 · 16 min read · Configuration, Automation, ProductivityRead →

The documentation graveyard: why we write docs to forget them

Documentation graveyards are not created by engineers who hate writing. They are created by organisations that treat knowledge as a one-off clean-up task instead of maintained product infrastructure.

8 May 2023 · 24 min read · Quality, Standards, ProductivityRead →

jq: a Swiss Army knife for JSON on the command line

Most developers meet jq as a pretty-printer and go no further. Underneath that single command is a filter language rich enough to reach into nested JSON, reshape an API response, and build request bodies, all composable with Unix pipes and all comfortable inside a one-liner.

10 April 2023 · 14 min read · Automation, Productivity, ConfigurationRead →

Floating point: the maths your computer quietly gets wrong

Most developers learn that 0.1 plus 0.2 looks strange, then quietly file it under language trivia. The real lesson is sharper: computers do not store numbers the way humans write them, and consequences compound.

20 March 2023 · 11 min read · Standards, Patterns, QualityRead →

Git worktrees: parallel branches without the stash juggling

A colleague asks for an urgent review whilst a refactor is halfway across the working tree. The usual ways to juggle parallel branches are all bad: a panicky git stash, a second clone that drifts out of sync, or a polite request to wait.

15 January 2023 · 13 min read · Git, Productivity, ConfigurationRead →