NOTES FROM THE PRACTICE
Short pieces on maintaining software that other people wrote.
I write irregularly, on questions that come up repeatedly in client work. The pieces here are notes rather than articles — things I have learned once and want to remember the next time.
ON MAINTENANCE
2026 · 03
On reading somebody else's Rails app before touching it.
Four hours of reading saves forty hours of rewriting. A short guide to the order I open files in.
2025 · 07
Backups you have not tested are not backups.
A small, annotated checklist for the backup restore drill I run on every system I inherit.