Opinion

Vendor the small algorithm, don't add the dependency

The reflex to reach for a package for everything is wrong for small, stable, well-specified code. Why I vendored the FSRS-5 spaced-repetition algorithm into my iOS app instead of adding a dependency — and where vendoring is the wrong call.

gRPC vs REST: when I actually reach for each (and when gRPC is a mistake)

gRPC vs REST gets argued in the abstract. I've shipped both — a Rails↔Go deploy engine on gRPC, browser uploads on plain WebSockets. Here's my actual rule for choosing, and the cases where gRPC is the wrong call.