Writing

Engineering, told cinematically

Distributed systems, observability and AI engineering — each pattern gets a genre: a silent hero, a noir detective, a night at the theater.

3 stories · updated Aug 2026
The Outbox Pattern illustration: dual-write failure vs. the outbox relay guaranteeing delivery
Distributed Systems · Hero Story

The Outbox Pattern: The Silent Hero of Distributed Services

How one table and one transaction absorb broker outages, retries and traffic spikes so your microservices don't have to — the pattern that never trends, yet quietly holds up production.

Detective-noir illustration of an engineer tracing a request through a server rack
Observability · Detective Noir

The Case of the Vanishing Request: Distributed Tracing

A request died somewhere across forty services — no body, no witness. Three witnesses, one thread (the trace ID), and the waterfall exhibit that cracks the case in one screen.

A stage director watches a robot performer rehearse under a spotlight
AI Engineering · Comedy in Five Acts

Same Show Every Night: Deterministic Systems from Non-Deterministic AI

You've hired a brilliant improv actor for a role that must be identical eight shows a week. Schemas, validators, a deterministic orchestration sandwich and evals — with a live interactive demo.