Writings

Lessons from building infrastructure projects with long-running coding agents.

The world often feels like it’s falling apart, but the data tells a different story. Here are 32 charts showing measurable human progress across health, education, technology, environment, and human rights. Last updated: 2025-08-17 16 Bad Things That Are Decreasing Legal Slavery Number of countries where slavery is legal Maternal Deaths Deaths per 100,000 live births ...

In software engineering, we often focus on the technical side of our work—designing scalable systems, writing clean code, and mastering our tools. But the most impactful lessons are often learned in the spaces between the pull requests. They’re about people, trust, and self-awareness. Here are a few hard-learned lessons from my time building and scaling infrastructure. Lesson 1: A Technical Win Can Be a Team Loss When I joined Substack, the company was running on about 40 Heroku dynos. A migration to AWS had been discussed, but three months into my tenure, no real movement had occurred. ...

How we built a scalable real-time Pub/Sub system that handles a billion messages per week.

A collection of personal principles.