WRITING
Blog
War stories from production, and things built in the garage.
- We Spent Days Debugging the Wrong System (and Accidentally Fixed Minnesota's Internet) · 5 min readA multi-day incident where everyone assumed the frontend was broken. The frontend was fine. One carrier's transit leg between our users and the CDN was dropping packets, and a remote team spread across states was the thing that finally made it visible.
- The Bug That Traveled at the Speed of Light · 8 min readEvery Friday at 5:00 PM, drivers in Germany claimed more shifts than existed. The code was right, the database was right, and the bug was the Atlantic Ocean. A race condition where the response beat the truth home.
- Driving a DC Motor with a Raspberry Pi and an L298N Dual H-Bridge · 5 min readThe rover needed motors a Pi HAT couldn't feed, so I moved to a bare L298N. Wiring, the jumpers nobody explains, a ten-line RPi.GPIO script, and, ten years late, the PWM speed control I promised at the end.
- The Pi Car: A Web-Controlled Robot for a Seven-Year-Old · 5 min readA four-motor Raspberry Pi car my daughter drove from an iPad, with a heading-and-speed command queue served by the Pi itself. Consolidated from three unfinished 2016 posts, with what I got wrong and where the car is now.
- Curiosity Rover Garage Build · 2 min readI thought it would be fun to build a rover for myself. Naturally there are significant limitations on what I have the time and resources to build, so it will have to be a bit smaller.