Blog

My thoughts on software development, technology trends, and programming best practices.

1am and a broken backfill

An on-call story about a data backfill that fell over halfway through, and why the 1am work has taught me more than the things that went to plan.

July 28, 2026
Matthew Salamack

How I actually use AI to write code

I moved most of my development into an agentic workflow with Claude Code. It's less 'walk away' and more 'read every line.'

June 11, 2026
Matthew Salamack

The report that wouldn't load

A report that kept timing out, and the unglamorous reason it was slow. Spoiler: it was a loop, not the database.

May 8, 2026
Matthew Salamack

Text messages lie to you

Delivery-status webhooks show up out of order, so you can't take them at face value. Here's how I stopped my message state from lying to me.

March 10, 2026
Matthew Salamack

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