Hello, I'm Luke

Latest Posts

• The Node.js Upgrade We Put Off Until a CVE Forced Our Hand

  nodejs security technical-debt consulting devops

  A client's API had been running Node 16 for two years past end-of-life. When a critical OpenSSL vulnerability dropped, the "we'll upgrade next quarter" plan collapsed into a three-week fire drill. The upgrade itself wasn't hard. Undoing two years of drift was.

  Published On

  July 13, 2026

  Read more →

• The Rate Limiter That Let Everything Through

  api-design performance reliability consulting architecture

  A client's API had rate limiting configured and enforced. It still couldn't prevent a single customer from tanking performance for everyone else. The problem wasn't the limiter — it was what we were counting.

  Published On

  July 10, 2026

  Read more →

• Reviewing AI Code Is the New Bottleneck

  ai code-review consulting developer-experience productivity

  Last quarter I tracked my time across three consulting engagements. I spent 11 hours a week reviewing AI-generated code and under 8 writing my own. The ratio surprised me, and it changed how I think about developer productivity.

  Published On

  July 8, 2026

  Read more →

• The Memory Leak That Only Showed Up on Tuesdays

  debugging nodejs performance consulting memory

  A Node.js service kept getting OOMKilled, but only on Tuesdays. The batch job was a red herring. The real problem was a lazy cache eviction strategy that nobody thought to question.

  Published On

  July 6, 2026

  Read more →

• The Sixty-Seven Environment Variables Nobody Documented

  configuration devops consulting developer-experience debugging

  A client's deployment kept failing in staging but not locally. The root cause wasn't code — it was sixty-seven environment variables spread across five files with no documentation and no single source of truth.

  Published On

  July 3, 2026

  Read more →