Hello, I'm Luke

Latest Posts

• The GraphQL Migration We Quietly Abandoned

  architecture consulting api-design developer-experience

  A client was six months into migrating from REST to GraphQL. Half their endpoints were converted, developer experience was arguably worse, and the frontend team was maintaining two data layers. Sometimes the right engineering decision is to stop.

  Published On

  September 4, 2026

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• The Backfill That Raced Against Live Traffic

  databases debugging consulting data-integrity postgres

  We ran a data backfill on 140,000 subscription records while the app was live. Three weeks later, 1,800 customers had the wrong renewal date. The script looked fine. The bug was in the timing.

  Published On

  September 2, 2026

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• Nobody Quits Over On-Call. Except They Do.

  on-call engineering-culture consulting retention developer-experience

  On-call never shows up in exit interviews. But across half a dozen consulting engagements, I've watched it quietly hollow out engineering teams. The pattern is always the same, and it's always fixable.

  Published On

  August 31, 2026

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• The Token Refresh That Turned Into a Thundering Herd

  authentication debugging distributed-systems consulting architecture

  Every 30 minutes, the auth server spiked to 100% CPU and shed requests. The pattern was so regular you could set a watch by it. Turned out every user's JWT expired at the same time.

  Published On

  August 28, 2026

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• The Graceful Shutdown That Wasn't

  kubernetes node.js debugging infrastructure consulting

  Every deploy dropped a handful of requests. The service had a SIGTERM handler. It just didn't do what anyone thought it did.

  Published On

  August 26, 2026

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