Hard-won knowledge from building things — what worked, what failed, and what I'd do differently. Derived from real project experience, not a curriculum.
A migration system that works is not just a runner that applies SQL files. It's a system that can answer, at any moment: exactly what state is prod in, how did it get there, and what happens if someone deviates from the path? UbixCore's migration standard is built around that question.
Read more →Upgrade debt is a structural problem, not a behavioral one. If shared libraries can be ignored, they will be. UbixCore's monorepo makes ignoring them impossible — every PHP API and every SvelteKit frontend upgrade together, in one commit.
Read more →SOLID principles are easy to describe and hard to apply. Here's what applying three of them actually looked like in The 8-Bit Machine — with the git history to prove it.
Read more →When AI tools became part of the daily workflow, the first instinct was to write one set of guidelines for everyone. That was wrong. Different engineers need different guardrails — and the difference matters more than you'd expect.
Read more →The 8-Bit Machine started as something specific. At v0.8 a single commit changed the direction entirely: 'Pivot to general-purpose 8-bit machine designer.' Here's why that decision was right, and how to recognize when you're facing the same one.
Read more →The 8-Bit Machine emulates the 1541 disk drive with a cycle-accurate IEC serial bus state machine. It also has a warp load trap that bypasses the whole thing. Both exist. Here's why.
Read more →Human code reviewers should be asking 'is this solving the right problem?' not 'why is this indented wrong?' Machine code review handles the mechanical checks so humans can focus on the things only humans can evaluate.
Read more →XenTask is a 13-service microservice architecture. Building it taught me three things that no microservices tutorial covers: what shared code costs across repos, how to use the platform for service discovery instead of building your own, and what 13 independent pipelines actually feel like to operate.
Read more →Five years building a hosted VoIP platform from scratch — architecting the stack, raising $400K, growing to 200+ customers, and what I'd do differently with what I know now.
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