I’ve spent nearly seven years documenting how we built Fathom: outages, DDoS attacks, migrations, $100k AWS savings, my cofounder’s retirement, and a divorce. I write transparently because I want other people to learn from my mistakes. These 18 posts tell the story:

I've lost my patience with GitHub. Going to be migrating our CI pipeline off of Actions because I'm fully tired of the regular outages from this platform. I know they're having growing pains, I get it, but I'm so tired of issue after issue. They have Microsoft money!

There are more vulnerable PHP sites right now than patched ones. Most people have no idea what went down today.

Look at how every vendor behaved today in response to the gigantic PHP security release and make your future choices based on the evidence. Laravel was the winner today. DigitalOcean was six hours late and sent nothing yesterday. Better late than never, I guess...

A huge thank you to the Laravel team for everything they've done (and are still doing) in response to the critical PHP security advisory. We took preventative measures yesterday and I was very happy to receive a "we are handling it" email from them. Well done to all involved.

One of the top exchanges I've seen on this platform. Someone tries to dunk on PHP developers and... well... 🤣

This would be a pretty funny time for GitHub to have another outage.

Great timing

I gave the same audit prompt to Opus fast mode on Cursor and Conductor with my Claude subscription powering it. I paid Cursor $3.61, which is API pricing, but the audit was finished in 2 minutes. Conductor was still going after 16 minutes. Cursor caught everything. Time is money.

I have Cursor Ultra, Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Plus. The only harness that gives me a flow state is Cursor. You pay API pricing to move rapidly and the harness is absolutely top tier. But if you're happy with your current setup, don't try Cursor, because you'll be hooked.

Last night I asked ChatGPT to build a replacement for an app I pay $10/month for. I wanted to build out some features specifically for my use case. Today I woke up and checked it, it was the perfect clone. Then I decided that this project was a waste of my time and deleted it.

What should a junior software engineer do in 2026? Learn. You have an infinite supply of educational resources. Learn to prompt, make mistakes, ship things, break things, get hacked, and document your journey. When I had my first job interview at 17, I had shipped 20+ projects.

I don't know enough about cybersecurity to comment but I do know about DevOps. I think that the bar has risen for entry into every role and that we may see the return of the full-stack software engineer who does everything.