No, Really, Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator
A deeper dive into why shell scripts cannot replace a proper CI control plane, drawn from years of building and operating CI systems at scale.
Software engineer, indie hacker, food enthusiast.
I'm Ian, a software engineer and entrepreneur based in The Netherlands. I'm an engineer at Mercury, a financial technology company that develops bank products for startups of all sizes. I write about engineering, cooking, and life.
Engineering
GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team
Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.
Punycode: My New Favorite Algorithm
A deep dive into how Punycode works, and why I think it's so neat.
The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types
A comprehensive guide to CRDTs and their tradeoffs, from counters to sequences. Written in the spirit of the Typeclassopedia, exploring how different CRDTs solve the distributed consensus puzzle.
Cooking
The Cadence of Salting
When you salt matters as much as how much you salt. Understanding the timing changes everything.
Personal
What You Need to Know About Trump\
A look at the Trump administration\
Actuarial Murder and Other Diffuse Acts of Violence
An exploration of how institutional decisions and systemic policies can cause widespread harm with less accountability than direct violence, examining cases from healthcare to education where bureaucratic choices have life-altering consequences despite being treated as mere business decisions.
The Cruel Part Is
A poem
Vignettes
A collection of memories