alacritty + tmux + nvim + zsh + Claude Code in a single screen. The choices and structure behind a terminal-centric development environment.

A good engineer isn’t someone who knows technology well, but someone who can share that knowledge with their team.

A retrospective on column-level encryption of sensitive data in a running service. Envelope encryption, DEK granularity decisions, the WHERE clause constraint that led to HMAC, and the migration automation Skill that spread the work across the org.

A retrospective on the internal hackathon. How an idea I proposed evolved with the team into a 1st-place project and an internal launch — and the starting point for using AI tools in earnest.

Looking at JIRA’s issues and workflows as a graph of work units — covering the Sprint lifecycle, issue hierarchy, Git/GitHub integration patterns, and automation flows.

GitHub Actions seen as an event-driven automation engine — the three-layer abstraction of workflow / job / step, plus the operational details of triggers, runners, and secrets.

Looking at GitHub PRs as a collaboration layer on top of Git’s change graph, and walking through the Code Review cycle, PR-level design, and merge strategies.

Looking at Git as a graph of changes — and seeing how commit hygiene, branching strategy, and the merge-vs-rebase choice are all decisions about the shape of that graph.

How Security Groups (stateful, per-instance) and NACLs (stateless, per-subnet) form different layers of defense in a VPC, plus the common pitfalls each surface.

Comparing the four mechanisms that connect a VPC to other VPCs, on-premises networks, and external services — Peering, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site VPN, and PrivateLink — across topology and cost.