About me

Hi, I'm Drew. I learn best by building the smallest real version of the thing I am trying to understand, then following the questions it creates.

If I want to understand a database, I try to build one. If I want to understand service discovery, I wire a few services together and see where the clean diagram starts lying. That usually pulls me toward backends, distributed systems, infrastructure, and the practical details that make software behave in the real world.

Some recent threads: a database from scratch in Go, a Twitter-style feed service for poking at fanout tradeoffs, and FastAPI microservices for learning service discovery and Kubernetes. They are not perfect showcase projects. They are working projects that make the tradeoffs harder to dodge.

I also spend a lot of time in my homelab. Proxmox, containers, backups, media storage, and small self-hosted services have a nice way of turning "I think I understand this" into "why is this down at 11pm?"

This blog is where I keep notes from that process. I write about what I built, what confused me, what broke, and what I would do differently next time. The useful part is usually the middle, before everything has been cleaned up into a neat story.