Staff engineering means multiplying others
What my first Staff role taught me about mentorship, anticipating blockers, reducing risk, and leading without doing everything myself.
Read noteWriting
Notes from the workbench.
Essays and field notes on software, creative work, and the things between.
Engineering mentorship without prescriptive advice
The most useful mentors share stories, develop repeatable behaviors, and help people find a path that is genuinely their own.
Read noteScaling MediaSoup across SFUs with PipeTransports
How producer streams can be piped into a tree of MediaSoup routers, plus the signaling, keyframe, and lifecycle problems that follow.
Read noteWhat graceful SFU draining taught me after shipping
A technically sound design can still surprise adjacent systems. The work after launch changed how I think about infrastructure projects.
Read noteWhen Kubernetes needed an application-level escape hatch
Long grace periods protect users during normal deploys, but emergency shutdowns revealed surprising SIGTERM and SIGKILL behavior.
Read noteGraceful SFU draining without ending the call
Designing a distributed drain sequence where servers announce retirement, routers propagate state, and clients choose a safe moment to move.
Read noteMentor the person, not a younger version of yourself
Comparison, ambition, and the subtle difference between helping someone follow your path and helping them discover theirs.
Read noteProduction observability as continuous testing
Tests validate the scenarios we can imagine. Production cohorts show whether the system works across the traffic, timing, and behavior we could not reproduce.
Read noteChoosing Fulbright when another door opened
Accepting a Fulbright scholarship meant stepping away from a career-changing opportunity and trusting that the door to the United States could open again.
Read note