In Praise of Control Planes, or: Why You Need a Place to Stand
The control plane pattern (a coordinator that tells workers what to do) shows up everywhere good infrastructure exists. The concept is simple. Naming it is useful.
Software engineer, indie hacker, food enthusiast.
I'm Ian, a software engineer and entrepreneur based in The Netherlands. I'm an engineer at Mercury, a financial technology company that develops bank products for startups of all sizes. I write about engineering, cooking, and life.
Engineering
Your Best Thinking Is Wasted on the Wrong Decisions
Some engineering decisions punish you for being wrong. Most don't. Learning to tell the difference and calibrate your deliberation accordingly might be the most valuable skill your team never explicitly develops.
No, Really, Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator
A deeper dive into why shell scripts cannot replace a proper CI control plane, drawn from years of building and operating CI systems at scale.
GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team
Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.
Cooking
The Cadence of Salting
When you salt matters as much as how much you salt. Understanding the timing changes everything.
Personal
What You Need to Know About Trump\
A look at the Trump administration\
Actuarial Murder and Other Diffuse Acts of Violence
An exploration of how institutional decisions and systemic policies can cause widespread harm with less accountability than direct violence, examining cases from healthcare to education where bureaucratic choices have life-altering consequences despite being treated as mere business decisions.
The Cruel Part Is
A poem
Vignettes
A collection of memories