This database cluster contains most of Etsy's online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards.

AI collapsed the cost of building software, but the systems underneath are buckling.

It took us 4–5 incidents over several weeks to even recognise the pattern.

All those systems were air-gapped, meaning the team that builds the software has no access to metrics, logs or runtime.

From the inside, it was a systems failure spread across FastAPI, uvicorn, Redis, ClickHouse, APScheduler, Docker memory limits, and a startup sequence that had quietly become a deterministic self-attack.

There is a distinct, visceral kind of pain in watching an otherwise brilliant engineer hold down the Backspace key for six continuous seconds to fix a typo at the beginning of a line.

We’ve all been there. We learn ls, cd, and grep, and then we sort of… stop. The terminal becomes a place we live in-but we rarely bother to arrange the furniture. We accept that certain tasks take forty keystrokes, completely unaware that the shell authors solved our exact frustration sometime in 1989.

Here are some tricks that aren’t exactly secret, but aren’t always taught either. To keep the peace in our extended Unix family, I’ve split these into two camps: the universal tricks that work on almost any POSIX-ish shell (like sh on FreeBSD or ksh on OpenBSD), and the quality-of-life additions specific to interactive shells like Bash or Zsh.

Blockchain RPC skills for AI coding agents

Instead of managing node groups, installing Karpenter, configuring the VPC CNI plugin, deploying the AWS Load Balancer Controller, setting up the EBS CSI driver, and keeping all of those components updated and compatible with each other - you enable a single flag and AWS handles all of it.

After a few years of writing open-source Terraform modules, I've picked up a few syntax tricks that make code safer, cleaner, and easier to maintain.

After successfully adopting Terraform for GitHub repository management, the next step in our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) journey was clear: dogfood our own product and manage our domains and DNS zones using the DNSimple Terraform provider.

DriftHound is a Rails WebApp that receives Terraform drift reports via API and provides visibility into infrastructure drift across your projects.

A lightweight, single-binary OpenTelemetry viewer for local development. Visualize traces, logs, and metrics from your instrumented applications — no Docker, no databases, no complex setup.

Run multiple agents in parallel — each in its own container, with its own workspace, collaborating on your code or project files simultaneously.

A personal knowledge base that turns markdown notes into a semantically-connected, AI-augmented knowledge graph.

Atomic stores knowledge as atoms — markdown notes that are automatically chunked, embedded, tagged, and linked by semantic similarity. Your atoms can be synthesized into wiki articles, explored on a spatial canvas, and queried through an agentic chat interface.

More and more enterprises want the benefits of AI-assisted coding, automatic completions, suggestions, and inline generation, without sending their source code to external APIs.

This has naturally increased interest in self-hosted coding assistants, where all inference runs on internal hardware and all models stay inside a controlled environment.

We built a complete prototype of such a system. In this article, we walk through its architecture, explain how Kubernetes is used to deploy it, and how different system parameters interact to determine real-world performance. In a separate post, we study how the llama.cpp inference server behaves under increasing load.