About

Most of what I have built has a single load-bearing decision in it, and the rest of the system is downstream of getting that one right. One manager contract in front of every courier and payment gateway, so adding a provider is a class and a config entry rather than a change that leaks across the domain. Identity verification gating the payout path instead of signup, so the funnel stays open and the money boundary stays closed. An ingestion pipeline where every source owns its own state machine, because a shared pipeline status tells you the pipeline is unhealthy and nothing about which supplier is stuck.

I try to find that decision early, write down what it costs, and then build the boring parts quickly. The decisions sections in the case studies are the honest record of that, including where the cost landed somewhere I did not expect.

PHP is the spine: Laravel across most of the recent work, with Phalcon and CodeIgniter running concurrently rather than in sequence. Holding three frameworks at once makes it obvious how much of a framework is convention and how little of it is the actual problem.

Postgres where the work is transactional, MySQL where it was already there and migrating would have bought nothing. TypeScript on the front, Next.js and Astro depending on whether the surface is authenticated and interactive or anonymous and cacheable. Stripe with usage-based metering, which is where accounting correctness and engineering convenience stop agreeing with each other.

Small teams or alone, usually owning a system end to end rather than a layer of it. That means the test suite is not a coverage number, it is the thing that lets me refactor a module I have not opened in two months without breaking the four that depend on it.

I would rather ship a smaller thing that holds under load than a larger thing that needs watching. Most of what makes a system survive is decided before any of it is fast.