Measuring what you actually feel

2026-07-14

Average throughput is the number everyone quotes and almost nobody experiences. What a person notices sitting in front of a screen is the tail: the ninety-ninth percentile of round-trip time, the stall while a buffer drains, the half second before the first byte. A link can be fast and still feel broken.

Small machines, fewer moving parts

2026-05-02

A two-gigabyte virtual machine is enough to run more than people expect, provided the parts are boring. One process per job, plain files for configuration, logs that a human can read without a query language. Complexity is rented, not owned.

On keeping notes in public

2026-03-21

Anything written for an audience of one gets sloppy. Publishing forces the second pass where the actual reasoning shows up — usually along with the mistake.