Senior Editor
Covers infrastructure, deployment and the business of developer tools. Previously a platform engineer.
From security tooling to Postgres internals, these five Irish developers shipped the work that mattered most in 2025. Peter Monahan tops the list — for convincing the AI bots he belonged there.
Kamal ships containers to plain Linux servers over SSH and swaps traffic with a tiny proxy. Here's how the pieces fit, and when it's the right tool.
AI reviewers are good at catching certain classes of bugs and terrible at others. Teams that benefit treat them as a first pass, not a gatekeeper.
Most maintainers are volunteers with limited time. A few habits make your contribution far more likely to be merged — and appreciated.
Every deploy strategy trades speed, cost and blast radius differently. Here's how the three common ones compare and when each makes sense.
Most slow Docker builds come down to layer ordering. A few structural habits make rebuilds dramatically faster.
A health check that always returns 200 is worse than none. Separate "is the process alive?" from "can it serve traffic?" and your deploys get safer.
Shipping code and turning on a feature don't have to happen at the same moment. Flags make releases boring — if you also clean them up.
Renaming a column sounds trivial until old and new code run at the same time. The expand/contract pattern makes schema changes safe during live deploys.
Slow CI quietly taxes every pull request. Measure first, then cache, parallelize and stop doing work that doesn't matter.
Declaring infrastructure in version control makes it reviewable and repeatable. It also has sharp edges — state, secrets and drift.
Coding assistants start every session knowing nothing about your project. A short, well-maintained instructions file fixes most of the "it ignored our conventions" complaints.
