Writing
Notes on payments, architecture, and engineering leadership.
Most pieces are anonymized lessons from production work — what I'd tell my younger self, what I've watched go wrong in code review, what I wish someone had written down five years ago.
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Migrating a .NET Payments Platform to AWS with Zero Downtime
What "zero downtime" actually means for a payments platform, the five categories of risk most teams skip, and the rollback gate that saved us at 3 AM.
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Decomposing a 1.5M-LOC Monolith Without Stopping the World
Strangler-fig sequencing, bounded contexts without dogma, the contract-test layer that buys you speed, and the outbox-pattern mistake we made.
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What "Hands-On Engineering Manager" Actually Means
The math behind 30% time in code. Where it pays compound interest. Where it backfires. And the one question I ask before every IC task I take on.
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Idempotency Keys in Payments — Five Mistakes I've Watched Get Shipped
The "obviously correct" implementations that ship duplicate charges anyway. Composite keys, retry windows, state machines, and which layer is the right one.
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