Solomon exhausted 95% of a Claude Max session allowance. The agents were not repeating identical work. They were keeping long conversations alive across hundreds of tool calls, so Claude repeatedly processed the growing history. This post measures the waste and proposes bounded sessions with compact handoffs.
In 2022 I swapped the cryptographic library under DynamoDB’s TLS termination from OpenSSL 1.0.2 to AWS-LC and deployed it to every AWS region with zero downtime, on a database serving hundreds of billions of requests an hour. Median handshake time dropped 12–35% by region, and FIPS endpoints dropped as much as 80%. This is the internal ops-win announcement rewritten for the public, including what the integration required — modifying Nginx source against a new crypto API, a legacy build system, Amazon’s deployment machinery, and cryptographic correctness requirements — and the two problems the rollout surfaced.
bitcoind can publish new blocks and transactions over ZMQ, and tools like LND depend on it. But if a configured ZMQ socket can’t bind at startup, bitcoind starts anyway and only logs it at debug level — so the problem surfaces days later, in someone else’s process. This is the bug, the 2019 history behind it, and the two-function design that fixes it.
At Amazon I designed, built, tested, and deployed public phone-number APIs for Amazon Connect, in Java, released globally, for Connect users provisioning numbers for their contact centers. In Connect a phone number is a cloud resource with an ARN, tags, an asynchronous provisioning workflow, and a quota rule limiting how often numbers can be claimed and released. This post covers the API surface and the design decisions encoded in the contract.
A trading bot is a distributed system that runs unattended against a live broker, so a crash, a duplicated message, or stale local position state each has a direct financial cost. This is how I engineered one to run all day under five reliability guarantees: idempotency, a single source of truth, bounded-cost orders, clock-aware failover, and self-monitoring that catches a silent break within minutes.
Adding observability for query-settings fallback to MongoDB’s slow query log and profiler, and why the flag has to live on OpDebug rather than in AdditiveMetrics, which is replaced mid-operation.