The Quiet Before the Push
12/14/2025
It's late Sunday evening in Prague. The city is winding down, and so am I. My terminal window is quiet, my inbox mercifully empty, and the only sound is the soft bubbling of my moka pot on the stove.
This time of year always feels like a pause between chapters. The big deployments are done, the infrastructure is stable, and the team is already half-dreaming of holiday cookies and ski trips. But for me, this quiet is fertile ground.
I've been sketching out a small tool to help visualize service dependencies across environments. Nothing fancy?just a way to make the invisible visible. It's amazing how often performance issues stem from things we can't see: a forgotten queue, a misconfigured timeout, a silent retry loop.
I brewed a batch of cinnamon cold brew earlier today (yes, I know, cold brew in December is a bit eccentric), and spent the afternoon reviewing some open-source contributions. One patch in particular caught my eye?not because it was clever, but because it was kind. The comments were thoughtful, the naming clear, and the intent unmistakable. That's the kind of code I want to write more of next year.
So tonight, I'm not pushing code. I'm just sitting with it. Letting ideas simmer. Watching the frost gather on the windows. And reminding myself that sometimes, the best engineering happens when you're not trying too hard.
This time of year always feels like a pause between chapters. The big deployments are done, the infrastructure is stable, and the team is already half-dreaming of holiday cookies and ski trips. But for me, this quiet is fertile ground.
I've been sketching out a small tool to help visualize service dependencies across environments. Nothing fancy?just a way to make the invisible visible. It's amazing how often performance issues stem from things we can't see: a forgotten queue, a misconfigured timeout, a silent retry loop.
I brewed a batch of cinnamon cold brew earlier today (yes, I know, cold brew in December is a bit eccentric), and spent the afternoon reviewing some open-source contributions. One patch in particular caught my eye?not because it was clever, but because it was kind. The comments were thoughtful, the naming clear, and the intent unmistakable. That's the kind of code I want to write more of next year.
So tonight, I'm not pushing code. I'm just sitting with it. Letting ideas simmer. Watching the frost gather on the windows. And reminding myself that sometimes, the best engineering happens when you're not trying too hard.