Marcus Webb

Writing new code is glamorous. Keeping old code alive is where the real money goes. Here's the economics behind that gap.

Dropping a column feels like cleanup. In practice, it's one of the easiest ways to take down a production system.

Every distributed system makes promises it can't keep. Understanding why is the difference between building systems that fail gracefully and ones that fail catastrophically.

A single URL request touches dozens of systems before your browser renders anything. Here's what actually happens, and why any one of those steps can quietly break everything.

A product generating real revenue can still be a net drain on the company. Understanding why requires rethinking what 'cost' means in software.

Tony Hoare called null his billion-dollar mistake. Six decades later, we're still paying the bill. Here's why the fix never stuck.

Most breaches don't break the cipher. They steal the key. The security industry spent decades perfecting the lock and almost no time on who holds the keys.

The math on engineering talent is almost always done wrong. Salary is the least important number in the equation.

You write instructions for humans. The compiler rewrites them for machines. What happens in between is more interesting than most programmers realize.

When a venture fund stops deploying capital, its portfolio companies don't just lose a backer. They enter a slow-motion crisis most founders never see coming.

A dormant app isn't free to own. The ongoing costs of keeping one alive are real, largely invisible, and almost never factored into shutdown decisions.

Adding a second engineer feels like doubling your output. It usually isn't. Here's the friction you don't see coming.

The protocol that routes traffic across the entire internet was invented over lunch on napkins. It shows.

Shipping is the beginning of the expense, not the end. Most founders budget for launch and forget to budget for survival.

Being first gets you credit. Being second gets you customers. Here's why the pioneer rarely collects the prize.

End-to-end encryption is real and important. But most people misunderstand what it actually protects, and the gaps are where the danger lives.

GCC's development history reveals why compilers are not translators. They are aggressive optimizers that routinely rewrite your logic before it runs.

Cutting your AWS bill feels like discipline. For a mid-sized SaaS company, it turned into the most expensive decision they made all year.