Hi there 👋
My name is Max. I’m a software engineer and a writer. I love building things and sharing my knowledge with others.
The Case Against Always Using Agile Product Owners (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust My Team)
Why Your Product Owner Might Be Your Newest Bottleneck Let me paint you a picture: you’re at a sprint planning meeting watching your Product Owner argue with developers about database sharding strategies while the actual users haven’t seen a new feature in months. The JIRA board looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, and the only thing growing faster than the backlog is the team’s collective eye-roll. Congratulations - you’ve entered the Product Owner Twilight Zone....
Caffeinating Your Backend: How Async Programming Keeps Services Perky
Picture this: You’re running a coffee shop where every customer must wait in a single-file line. The barista meticulously completes each order before taking the next. Suddenly, Karen orders a pour-over with exacting temperature specifications. The line grows. Panic ensues. This, my friends, is synchronous programming in a nutshell - and exactly why we need asynchronous java…err, espresso. Brewing Concurrent Requests Without Spilling Modern backend systems are more like a team of baristas with walkie-talkies....
Why Your Code Isn't as Performant as You Think (And How to Stop Fooling Yourself)
Picture this: you’ve just crafted what feels like the Mona Lisa of algorithms. It’s elegant, it’s clean, and it passes all the tests. You deploy it with the confidence of a SpaceX engineer… only to watch your monitoring dashboards light up like a Christmas tree. What went wrong? Let’s peel back the layers of our collective self-delusion. The Confidence-Competence Chasm (Where Dreams Meet Flame Graphs) We’ve all been there - that moment when you realize your “optimized” code runs slower than a sloth on melatonin....
How Code Reviews Became Our Team's Secret Weapon Against Tribal Knowledge Hoarding
Picture this: You’re staring at a Python script that somehow uses walrus operators to parse XML while simultaneously brewing coffee. The original author? They’ve just boarded a one-way flight to Mars Colony One. This is why we don’t let junior devs write code after 3 espresso shots… and why code reviews are my team’s equivalent of a cryptographic checksum for knowledge preservation. From Merge Conflicts to Mind Melds Early in my career, I thought code reviews were just glorified spell checks for code....
The Fallacy of 'Always Use a CSS-in-JS Solution': When Stylesheets Fight Back
Let me paint you a picture: it’s 3 AM, your React component is bleeding styles like a zombie extra from The Walking Dead, and you’re knee-deep in styled-component wrappers. Suddenly it hits you - maybe CSS-in-JS wasn’t the silver bullet promised in that Medium article with the suspiciously perfect code samples. Welcome to my world, friend. Let’s dig into when CSS deserves its seat at the grown-ups table. The JavaScript Industrial Complex Claims Another Victim I’ll never forget the day I inherited a codebase where a button component needed 17 nested ThemeProviders just to change its hover color....