Fifteen years building systems that have to work

I build and run event-driven systems on AWS in TypeScript, end to end. Right now that means a multi-tenant commerce platform — seventeen serverless services, a Next.js admin app and an Astro storefront — where I own the multi-tenant authentication, the per-tenant site build pipeline and the CI/CD promotion flow. Before that I spent four years on inflight retail software deployed to hardware on aircraft, and five years running my own e-commerce business. I write here occasionally about the parts of the work that were harder than they looked.