Chaos Server

The moment when everything falls apart is not in the explosion, it’s in the quiet right after. - Lily (How to Trap a Tiger) I entered the tech workforce right as the dot-com bubble was inflating to its limits. My very first job out of the gate was providing 24x7 support for one of the largest e-commerce sites of the era. To say it was a trial by fire would be a massive understatement. The systems crashed. They crashed constantly. They crashed all the time. I would go to sleep at night clutching a pager in my hand so the vibration would wake me up without waking up my roommates (NOT A JOKE!). It was my job to keep the digital lights on, keep the servers upright, and somehow spin gold out of straw by writing actionable bug reports so the engineering team could actually fix the underlying infrastructure. You know what engineers love to do? Close bugs as “not reproducible.” The catch? “Back in my day,” there were no IDEs hooked up to production. There were no real-time debuggers or sl...

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good. - Stanley Kubrick The "No-Code" revolution has been coming for years, and I have been watching the shifting landscape of development. I’m still of the opinion that hand-crafted, artisanal code written by an expert will outperform AI-generated code. A hand-painted sign by an artist is more beautiful and performs better than a print-and-cut vinyl sign. Today, most signs are print-and-cut vinyl because it’s faster, cheaper, and gets the job done well enough. We have hit the point in development where the difference between hand-crafted code and generated-code doesn’t matter for a huge amount of development. Applications are going to be prompt-and-generate developed because it’s faster, cheaper, and gets the job done well enough. I had an introductory subscription to a workout app I’ve been using the last few months and really enjoying, but my trial pricing was ending ...