Articles
Full-stack was never the whole stack - AI just made it obvious
AI made writing code the cheap part. The bottleneck is now deciding what to build and checking whether it worked. Engineers who own that part are called product engineers, and you should try to become one.
upsert(): The Unsung Hero of Inserting Thousands of Rows in Laravel
A request that added a product to a membership with 5,000 members timed out. Instead of hiding it on a queue, we batched the writes, fetched only what we needed and skipped the ORM, and got it down to under a second and a half.
How do you estimate a project when AI writes the code?
AI didn't kill software estimation. It moved the uncertainty somewhere new. Your best-case number got really better. Your worst-case number got much harder to pin down. And the middle got wobblier than ever.
Leave a failing test before you go on vacation
Every year I dread coming back from vacation not because of the work, but because I have no idea where I left off. A failing test, a well-written TODO, and a slow first day back are all you need to ease back in.
How to write better
We're taught to write to explain, but that's not how good writing works. Good writing changes how readers think. It doesn't need to be original, just valuable. Know your audience. Open with their problem. Finish with your solution.
Do We Still Need NoSQL in 2026?
I graduated university in 2009. Back then, databases meant one thing: tables, rows, and relationships. A user has orders. Orders have products. Everything is connected, and you draw those connections carefully on a whiteboard before you write a single line of code.