What I shipped
The big one this month: Notes on caching, in three parts. This started as a section in the book, but it grew legs and became its own essay. It covers the naive Map-with-TTL approach, where it breaks down, and the layered pattern I reach for now. Writing it took three weeks; editing it took two more. That ratio feels about right.
I also pushed tinyq v1.2, which adds configurable retry backoff and a small dashboard for inspecting jobs. The dashboard is one HTML file with no dependencies. I’m unreasonably proud of it.
What I read
- “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppmann — A re-read, third time now. I pick up something new every time. This round it was the section on linearizability vs. serializability, which finally clicked.
- “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi — Not a tech book. A philosophy book disguised as a dialogue. Made me rethink how I handle feedback from strangers on the internet.
- Julia Evans’ latest zine on DNS — Julia has a gift for making complex things feel approachable. I wish I could draw like her.
One thing I’m thinking about
I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between writing for discovery and writing for communication. When I write blog posts, I’m usually discovering what I think as I go. But the reader needs the finished version — the version where I already know the answer. The gap between those two is where editing lives, and I think most technical writers (myself included) don’t spend enough time there.