Hello, World

This is the first post on my new site. I've been meaning to start writing for a while — not because I think the world needs another tech blog, but because writing forces me to think clearly about what I'm building and why.

Why write?

There's a quote I keep coming back to:

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

Most of what I know about software, I learned by doing it wrong first. Writing about those mistakes — and occasionally the things that went right — helps me understand them better.

What to expect

I'll write about:

• Systems and infrastructure — the messy, unglamorous work that makes everything else possible
• Tools I build — CLI utilities, automation, the small programs that make daily work better
• Things I'm learning — distributed systems, performance, whatever rabbit hole I've fallen into

A code sample

Here's a function I wrote recently that made me unreasonably happy:

async function retry<T>(
  fn: () => Promise<T>,
  attempts: number = 3,
  delay: number = 1000
): Promise<T> {
  for (let i = 0; i < attempts; i++) {
    try {
      return await fn();
    } catch (err) {
      if (i === attempts - 1) throw err;
      await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, delay * (i + 1)));
    }
  }
  throw new Error("unreachable");
}

Simple, but it replaced a dozen ad-hoc retry implementations across a codebase. Sometimes the best code is the code that deletes other code.

More soon. Thanks for reading.