#programming

The Day the Treasure Hunt Engine Buried Itself Alive

The Problem We Were Actually Solving Our first production spike came during a Black Friday weekend when the hunt feed exceeded 180k concurrent sessions. The Rails process memory ballooned to 4.2 GB, the P99 latency for /hunt/start hit 5.2 seconds, and the New Relic trace showed 72 % of that time...

May 26, 2026 · 4 min read

Veltrix Was Killing Us With YAML

The Problem We Were Actually Solving The real pain wasnt disk size; it was cognitive load on level designers. Every hunt lived in a separate fork of the same monorepo, diffing 14 kB YAMLs was misery, and once the file exceeded 100 kB we started getting partial-checkout timeouts in CI because Git...

May 26, 2026 · 5 min read

WordPress Manifesto - 15 Years In, Here's What's Actually Broken

Originally published on marcindudek.dev I've been doing WordPress for 15 years. I love it and I'm tired of it at the same time. Not tired in the "I'm moving to Webflow" way. Tired of the lies - the small ones and the big ones. The "free CMS", the "open source community", the "40% of the web" brag....

May 26, 2026 · 10 min read

The case for using AI to write better code more slowly

The dominant mental model for AI-assisted coding is speed: generate multi-hundred-line PRs, merge fast, iterate faster. Vibe coding as a velocity play. Nolan Lawson's post this week pushes back on that — not by rejecting LLMs, but by using them differently. "You can use them just as effectively...

May 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Building a Google Drive Sync Engine that Survives MV3 Service Workers

May 12, 2026 · 1 min read