Thoughts and opinions on platform engineering, infrastructure, and building software at scale — by Michael Zavarella.https://zavarella.dev/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2026/06/03/i-like-to-put-stickers-on-things/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2026/06/03/i-like-to-put-stickers-on-things/I like to put stickers on things. I like to put stickers on things because it’s a good way to keep things organized and know stuff at a glance. My first…Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:41:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2026/06/02/vibe-hiring/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2026/06/02/vibe-hiring/The coining of the phrase vibe coding was a big revelation for me. It gave me the word “vibe” to use again but in the context of work. Vibe coding is what…Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2025/10/29/hidden-systems/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2025/10/29/hidden-systems/I love diving into hidden systems. They've always been a fun puzzle for me to solve. Undocumented, mysterious, black boxes sitting in the corner of the…Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2025/09/25/billing-alarms/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2025/09/25/billing-alarms/I've gotten a couple of chuckles and almost a whole chortle from LinkedIn posts about runaway AWS bills. You have too, don't lie. Or you got smacked by…Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2025/09/17/a-vs-an/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2025/09/17/a-vs-an/A comes before words that start with a consonant sound.Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2019/10/30/fire-and-forget/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2019/10/30/fire-and-forget/I've gotten a lot of questions in my time about firing off a long running process in an ssh session and having them stop after logging out. This is…Wed, 30 Oct 2019 14:00:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/06/22/another-if-macro/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/06/22/another-if-macro/I'm working on a project now that requires a lot of lines like,Thu, 22 Jun 2017 15:44:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/02/17/clojure-deref/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/02/17/clojure-deref/Of all the weird symbols in the Clojure language, one of my favorites is @. Good ol' deref. It's necessary, but for reasons that weren't intuitive to me.Fri, 17 Feb 2017 02:22:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/02/07/queues-in-clojure/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/02/07/queues-in-clojure/Without the idea of a first in, first out (FIFO) queue, maintaining order would be very difficult. Or maybe, it's the other way around. Six to one, half a…Tue, 07 Feb 2017 22:00:00 GMThttps://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/01/19/map-vs-reduce/https://zavarella.dev/blog/2017/01/19/map-vs-reduce/Higher order functions are a powerful tool for functional programmers. The idea of higher order functions/functions as data has given rise to three…Thu, 19 Jan 2017 03:23:00 GMT