Week 44-45, 2025 - Power Over
All kinds of commitments are coinciding nowadays, stress-testing my calendar, to-do, and focus systems – and there are cracks showing. Previously blocked timeslots passed without any progress, lingering task items from previous days copy-pasted to today, and I stopped having Pomodoro sessions a few weeks ago. It's ironic that when I would need the support of my systems the most, it's when I can't find the time to use and maintain them properly! On the other hand, I had deep discussions with clients, different collaborations forming, and exciting introductions to potential customers.
One of the concrete outcomes of these days is the first new episode of The Retrospective, our engineering leadership podcast with Jeremy Brown. We kicked off our Third Season with a concept that's critical to understand to efficiently delegate: Task Relevant Maturity.
📋 What I learned recently
I need to increase WiFi coverage near the kids' part of the flat as they age, and I decided to upgrade my current router and use the old one as an access point. To ensure reliability and keep costs down, I ruled out mesh wifi and powerline adapters, running a long Ethernet cable to the AP. I imagined it's going to look messy having that and a power adapter around the old router, when I realized I could use Power over Ethernet, despite not being supported by any of these devices! Cheap injectors and splitters exist; all I had to pay attention to was to ensure they support at least gigabit network speed, and done: only one nice slim Ethernet cable running at the top of the wall, nice and clean.
🤔 Articles that made me think
Rearchitecting GitHub Pages
A decade-old blog post from the early exponential-growth era of GitHub. There are a lot of timeless ideas about how to approach a rewrite efficiently. A few I noted:
- Avoid premature optimizations. Tomorrow's uncertain; only solve today's problems.
- Get the most out of your current architecture. They were serving half a million sites with twice-hourly nginx config rebuilds before deciding it's time to do something more robust.
- Every good architecture design should have explicit tradeoffs, both to help today's decisions and to inform tomorrow's debates.
- Be pragmatic. Instead of implementing a new layer for request handling, they used an available feature to embed Lua code into the nginx request lifecycle. Lua is probably exotic to most web developers, but it's a pragmatic choice to sacrifice language familiarity for better performance. And the resulting product performed amazingly well, spending less than 3 ms in 98% of HTTP requests, of which they served millions per hour.
A good example of subtle UX
Not an article, but something I noticed during the latest Claude outage. In desperation, I was reloading their status site when I realized the "Subscribe to updates" button's slight jump before re-rendering the page, providing a subtle hint to a more efficient way to achieve what I'm here for: to immediately see when there is news on their current outage. Smooth.
That’s it for today, make a pragmatic choice this weekend,
Péter