Thoughts on distributed systems, software architecture, and building things that last.https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/heyho-testing-from-the-admin-pages/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/heyho-testing-from-the-admin-pages/Sun, 24 May 2026 14:26:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/git-bisect-workflow/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/git-bisect-workflow/A regression was three weeks old. Manual inspection would take hours. Git bisect found the culprit in 5 minutes and 7 binary searches.Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/saying-no-to-features/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/saying-no-to-features/Every 'yes' is a 'no' to something else. Learning to decline feature requests constructively was the most valuable skill I developed this year.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/astro-view-transitions/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/astro-view-transitions/View Transitions turned our multi-page site into a single-page-app feel without any framework. Here's the minimal setup.Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/write-good-error-messages/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/write-good-error-messages/A good error message tells you what failed, why it failed, and what to do about it. Most error messages I see only do the first.Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/python-rust-ffi/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/python-rust-ffi/We replaced a 200-line Python hot loop with 50 lines of Rust and got a 40x speedup. Here's the exact FFI setup.Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/hello-world/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/hello-world/My first blog post. Excited to start sharing my thoughts!Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/retrospective-rewrite/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/retrospective-rewrite/We spent four months rewriting a working system. It never shipped. Here's what we should have done instead.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/nginx-rate-limiting/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/nginx-rate-limiting/Application-level rate limiting burned CPU cycles. Moving it to Nginx cut response times and simplified our code.Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/testing-strategy-for-apis/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/testing-strategy-for-apis/Unit tests caught logic bugs. Integration tests caught wiring bugs. E2E tests caught nothing but added 20 minutes to CI. Here's what we changed.Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/reading-list-2025/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/reading-list-2025/Six books from 2025 that actually changed how I approach design, code, and collaboration — with specific takeaways from each.Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/observability-with-structured-logs/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/observability-with-structured-logs/Switching from text to structured JSON logs made debugging faster. Adding trace IDs made it instant. Here's the migration.Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/typescript-branded-types/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/typescript-branded-types/When a stringly-typed user ID and order ID look the same to the compiler, bad things happen. Branded types catch these at compile time.Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/building-habit-of-deep-work/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/building-habit-of-deep-work/Async communication is great for flexibility but terrible for focus when every Slack notification feels urgent. Here's what I changed.Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/linux-process-monitoring/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/linux-process-monitoring/A service's CPU spiked to 100% every hour. strace showed the culprit in 30 seconds. Here's the full investigation from top to flamegraph.Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/kubernetes-horizontal-scaling/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/kubernetes-horizontal-scaling/The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler was reacting 4 minutes late. The fix was one YAML field we'd ignored.Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/til-shell-jq-json/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/til-shell-jq-json/Five jq patterns I use daily — from extracting fields to reshaping nested JSON into CSV.Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/redis-cache-strategies/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/redis-cache-strategies/Cache-aside, read-through, write-through, and write-behind — each solves a different problem. Here's where each one broke for us.Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/tailwind-design-tokens/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/tailwind-design-tokens/Raw Tailwind classes are fast to write but hard to maintain. Design tokens bridge the gap between designer intent and utility classes.Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/database-migration-rollbacks/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/database-migration-rollbacks/A failed migration doesn't have to mean downtime. Here's how we structure migrations so every change is safely reversible.Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/react-server-components-thoughts/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/react-server-components-thoughts/Server Components change how you think about the network boundary. Six months in, here's what still catches me off guard.Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/on-call-fatigue/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/on-call-fatigue/After a particularly bad on-call week, I realized the alerts were the symptom, not the problem. The system needed redesign, not more monitoring.Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/staff-engineer-readings/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/staff-engineer-readings/The Staff Engineer title doesn't come with a playbook. Larson's book collects org patterns from real staff-plus engineers at tech companies.Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/api-rate-limit-strategies/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/api-rate-limit-strategies/Token bucket is simple. Sliding window is fair. Here's the trade-off we made and why we ended up keeping both.Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/docker-multi-stage-builds/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/docker-multi-stage-builds/Our Go binary was 18MB, but the image was 1.2GB. Multi-stage builds brought it to 22MB. Here's the exact Dockerfile.Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/github-actions-caching/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/github-actions-caching/Our CI was taking 12 minutes per push. Caching dependencies and build artifacts brought it to 3 minutes. Here's the cache-key strategy.Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/postgresql-connection-pool-tuning/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/postgresql-connection-pool-tuning/We cut p99 query latency by 40% just by changing three PgBouncer settings. Here's the before and after.Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/circuit-breaker-pattern/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/circuit-breaker-pattern/When a downstream dependency started failing, the circuit breaker pattern prevented cascading failures across three services.Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/learning-in-public/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/learning-in-public/Writing in public forces clarity. After six months, I understand topics better, get feedback faster, and have a searchable reference of what I've learned.Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/sql-query-optimization/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/sql-query-optimization/A dashboard query was timing out. EXPLAIN ANALYZE showed a sequential scan on a 2M-row table. One index brought it to 8ms.Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/go-context-patterns/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/go-context-patterns/Context cancellation is easy to get wrong. Here are three patterns that survived production — and one that didn't.Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/ddia-replication-chapters/https://mirfmaster.pages.dev/blog/ddia-replication-chapters/Replication strategies are trade-offs between consistency, latency, and availability. Here's what I took away from Kleppmann's deep dive.Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT