I Threw Away My AirPods
A good engineer isn’t someone who knows technology well, but someone who can share that knowledge with their team.
Retrospective
Sensitive Data Encryption — Module Design and Migration Retrospective
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.
Internal Hackathon Retrospective — 1st Place
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.
The Blind Spot in Deploy Change Verification — Campaign Cache Incident Retrospective
The deploy was two days old, and the metrics had been calm the whole time. The moment we turned off the cache refresh batch, ad serving stopped. A retrospective on the missing verification of what a deploy actually changed.