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Field Notes

Write-ups on the things I had to figure out the hard way — reverse-engineering, backend systems, and applied AI. The rule: write the post I couldn't find when I needed it.

• Jul 30, 2026·5 min read

  A hotel is a distributed system (building a resort PMS, part 1/3)

  Part 1 of 3. I work on real-time order systems. On the side, solo, I built a full PMS and booking engine for a boutique resort — and discovered the hotel forces the exact coordination patterns from my day job: sagas, outbox, inbox, idempotency.

  #distributed-systems#builder#architecture#series
• Jul 30, 2026·5 min read

  Time and identity are not what you think (building a resort PMS, part 2/3)

  Part 2 of 3. The hotel's strangest lessons were about truth over time: a 'day' that isn't midnight to midnight, prices frozen at booking, and money that must follow the guest and never the room number.

  #distributed-systems#data-modeling#architecture#series
• Jul 30, 2026·5 min read

  The patterns don't belong to a domain (building a resort PMS, part 3/3)

  Part 3 of 3. No silent decisions on money, systems that survive the network dropping, and the real lesson: good distributed-systems thinking is domain-independent — and building solo is what makes you feel why.

  #distributed-systems#builder#architecture#series
• Jul 30, 2026·8 min read

  A quota, a decaying curve, and the feature I almost missed

  An abstract allocation problem from real work: you can submit claims to an external approver who only says yes a limited number of times per period, and each yes gets harder to earn. The right policy was counterintuitive — and the win came from finding the right variable, not the fancier model.

  #optimization#data-science#modeling#judgment
• Jul 30, 2026·6 min read

  AI solved HOW. The whole job is now WHAT.

  A person who doesn't write code shipped a real, working dashboard — and tellingly, added a color picker nobody asked for. That story contains the entire shift: building is commoditized, and the scarce skill is now knowing what's worth building at all.

  #opinion#product#builder#ai
• Jul 30, 2026·8 min read

  The handoff is the tax: why development is collapsing into the builder

  For decades we split building software across specialists and paid for it in handoffs. The tooling that forced those splits is dissolving. I think the next unit of software work is one person owning the whole loop — ideation to adoption — and companies should be racing to enable it.

  #opinion#builder#platform-engineering#future-of-work
• Jul 29, 2026·7 min read

  The incident I couldn't follow — and how it made me learn Kubernetes

  Early in my career, a routine cluster upgrade took production down and I understood almost none of the words flying past in the incident channel. That discomfort is the best thing that happened to my engineering.

  #kubernetes#learning#incidents#career
• Jul 28, 2026·9 min read

  Automating a portal that really doesn't want to be automated

  A third-party partner portal with no public API, wrapped in bot protection. Here's every wall I hit getting reliable reads and writes out of it — and how each one fell.

  #reverse-engineering#playwright#automation#cloudflare