Starting a blog, seven years in

I've been writing software professionally since 2019 — Python and Django, mostly backend, mostly remote, for companies in the US, Canada and France. In all that time I never kept a blog.

The reason is the usual one: everything I learned felt either too obvious to write down or too specific to the codebase I happened to be in. Both of those turn out to be bad excuses.

What I plan to write about

Things I actually run into at work, written the way I'd explain them to a teammate:

• Django and DRF in production — patterns that hold up when a codebase gets large, and the ones that quietly don't.
• Third-party integrations — a lot of my career has been connecting systems that were never designed to talk to each other. There's more craft in that than it gets credit for.
• Testing — I write tests first, and I have opinions about why that keeps being worth it.
• Working remotely across time zones — seven years of it, all in a second language.

Why now

Writing forces a level of precision that reading doesn't. When I explain a decision and the explanation falls apart halfway through, that's useful information about the decision.

So this is partly for whoever finds it useful, and partly for me.

If something here is wrong or you want to argue about it, tell me — I'd rather know.