Through the Language Glass
Sapir-Whorf for programmers. It starts with เกรงใจ and xanh — words that don’t survive translation — and ends with what your language quietly makes hard to say.
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Senior Principal Software Engineer
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I build systems that other people build on top of: platform frameworks, integration contracts, and APIs. The work is invisible when it goes well and that's the point.
Right now, I set architectural direction for Arc's rendering and delivery services at The Washington Post — moving execution to the edge, decoupling services with event-driven designs, and making sure that when a third-party API fails at 3 a.m., nobody notices.
I studied computer science and linguistics, which turns out to be the same subject in two different domains. Both are about communication: one with computers and the other with people.
The Washington Post · Arc XP
EventBridge · EdgeWorkers · DataDog · GitHub Actions · Docker
Booz Allen Hamilton
Java · J2EE · SOAP/WSRP · SmartCard · CMMI Level 3
American Management Systems · University of Maryland OIT
<img src="/1x1.gif"> was load-bearing infrastructure.Slides rendered through ascii-image, a web component I wrote that turns an image into 80 columns of text. Decks are cached on this device so they open with the network off.
Sapir-Whorf for programmers. It starts with เกรงใจ and xanh — words that don’t survive translation — and ends with what your language quietly makes hard to say.
How a newspaper whose first edition ran four pages for three cents in 1877 got to containers and canary releases. Adapter patterns, strangler applications, and multi-armed bandits, pointed at a legacy CMS.
Why every front-end optimization you’ve been told to do exists. Walks a single request from DNS lookup through TLS handshake to paint, and sorts the milliseconds you control from the ones you don’t.
Those all need a network. Sorry.