Hello, I'm Luke

Latest Posts

• Stop Calling Everything Technical Debt

  code-quality consulting architecture developer-experience

  A client showed me their "tech debt backlog" with 214 items. Missing tests, outdated dependencies, bad naming, a database nobody understood, and an actual architectural shortcut from 2019. Lumping all of that into one bucket is why none of it gets fixed.

  Published On

  September 23, 2026

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• What I Look for in the First Hour of a New Codebase

  consulting code-quality developer-experience architecture

  After parachuting into dozens of client projects, I've developed a mental checklist for the first sixty minutes. Most of what matters isn't in the code itself.

  Published On

  September 21, 2026

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• The CSV Export That Took Down the API

  debugging consulting nodejs performance architecture

  A customer clicked "Export to CSV" on 380,000 records. The server loaded them all into memory, OOMed, and took the API offline for every tenant. The fix was straightforward. The real question is why nobody caught it sooner.

  Published On

  September 18, 2026

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• The API With a Zero Percent Error Rate and a Fifteen Percent Failure Rate

  debugging api-design observability consulting

  Our monitoring said everything was fine. Customers said it wasn't. Turns out, the API returned HTTP 200 for every response — including the ones that failed. The dashboards were blind.

  Published On

  September 16, 2026

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• The Coding Agent That Could Push to Main

  security ai ci-cd consulting github-actions

  A client's AI coding agent had contents:write on every repo in the org. When I asked who approved that, the answer was "the setup wizard." The defaults are the danger zone.

  Published On

  September 14, 2026

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