Don’t Compromise, Embed Postgres.

We’ve all been there. You start building a simple tool, the next big thing of course, but you want to keep things light, fast, and nimble-especially for your prototype. But adding postgres feels like bringing a grand piano to a camping trip. So, you settle for something “simpler.” Maybe you store data in JSON files or sprinkle your state across a few in-memory structures. Maybe you even build a small abstraction over it all, promising yourself, “When this thing gets big, I’ll swap this logic out for a real database.”

Context-Aware FastAPI Responses: Adding Errors and Warnings with ContextVar

Ever stared at a 500 Internal Server Error and thought, “This tells me everything I need to know”? Of course not. Unfriendly errors are the worst. The API consumer gets stuck wondering what went wrong, and you (the developer) end up sifting through logs trying to figure it out.

The Git-Backed UI: A Design Catastrophe Wrapped in Complexity

In software, simplicity is the key to good design. Users don’t need to struggle with complexity; they want tools that help them work, not get in the way. But tools like dbt Cloud, which should make data transformation easier, do the opposite. Instead of a simple process, they wrap users in layers of Git integration, adding confusion where there should be none.

Introducing Sludge - A terminal UI for Slurm clusters

Whether it’s way back when I used to fumble through htop at work to figure out what’s happening with some on-prem server, or if it’s today when lazydocker and k9s have grown into critical tools that maximize my productivity, I’ve always been a huge fan of terminal UIs–especially those that are highly interactive.

@singledispatch in Python - Get Rid of Those Long If-Statements

In this post I’d like to cover a cool python decorator that’s part of the built-in functools library called @singledispatch. It’s a favorite of mine and something I’ve been using quite a bit over the past year. I’m surprised how little I see it in projects I come across so hopefully this post will help it find its way into a repo or two. ;)

5 Tips for Surviving as an Engineer in a Non-Tech Organization

For decades, traditionally non-tech/low-tech companies have started to realize the competitive edge to be gained from investing in technology. We’ve seen an explosion of various “must-have” technical capabilities: real-time customer insights, predictive modeling, search engine optimization, personalization AI, just to name a few. The result of this is that the demand for engineers has also exploded and it would be a challenge to find an organization, in any industry, that does not have open positions for engineering roles.

Why I Left Netflix to Join a 3 Month Old Startup

Over the past few months, I’ve been asked about this enough times that I eventually found it a fitting topic for the first post for this blog. Let me start by saying that I loved working at Netflix! Nothing in life is perfect, but my time working for Netflix was a period of immense professional and personal growth. It felt like the first opportunity in my career where I could test the limits of my technical skill set. The culture of personal responsibility taught me how to own my failures and how to understand my successes. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from my colleagues and many of my professional relationships have extended into incredible friendships. Much of this fuels the question many people ask me: “Why did you leave Netflix to join Tabular, a brand new company?”