Var Zero

Engineering excellence is not an absolute standard. Quality depends on context, tradeoffs, and ultimately, the business decision.

Technical interviews often measure what is easy to evaluate rather than what the job actually requires. Is there a better way?

A post-mortem should explain what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. It is probably the most technical meeting in the development process.

Abstractions make software easier to work with, until maintaining the abstraction becomes more work than solving the problem it was meant to simplify.

The important question about AI-assisted programming isn't who writes the code. It's who understands the system.

Good code doesn't only describe what it does. It communicates why it exists. A look at how intent shapes names, abstractions, comments, and commit messages.

Retries are great for transient failures, but they can't solve eventual consistency. Treating one problem as the other often adds unnecessary complexity to distributed systems.

Everyone recognizes a microservice but nobody can define one. That's because microservices don't solve a technical problem, they solve an organizational one.

The industry conflates perfection with over-engineering. They're not the same. Over-engineering is solving the wrong problem; a perfect solution exists once the requirements are clear.

Every abstraction leaks. GraphQL is the only one I know that leaks in both directions: out to the frontend and back into the backend.