A side-scrolling 16/32-bit JRPG personal homepage theme for Zola. This is demo content — swap it for your own. Zola 2026-06-09T00:00:00+00:00 https://brandonhon.github.io/press-start/atom.xml 2026-06-09T00:00:00+00:00 2026-06-09T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://brandonhon.github.io/press-start/blog/keeping-a-server-honest/ <p>There is a particular kind of quiet that only arrives at 2 a.m., when the deploy has gone sideways and the only honest thing left in the room is the server. It does not lie. It does exactly what you told it to, which is the whole problem.</p> <h2 id="the-box-does-not-negotiate">The box does not negotiate</h2> <p>I had spent the evening convinced the fault was mine — a typo, a stray environment variable, a forgotten reload. It was none of those. It was a timer that fired thirty seconds too early, every time, with the patience of a thing that has nowhere else to be.</p> <blockquote> <p>A server kept honest is a server you can sleep next to.</p> </blockquote> <p>The fix was four lines. The lesson was longer: log the boring things, and keep the boring things boring. A machine that surprises you is a machine that has been allowed to.</p> <h2 id="what-i-changed">What I changed</h2> <ul> <li>Pinned the timer to a real clock, not an uptime-relative drift.</li> <li>Wrote down the assumption I had been carrying in my head.</li> <li>Went to bed.</li> </ul> <p>Come morning the graphs were flat, which is the highest praise a graph can offer.</p> 2026-05-28T00:00:00+00:00 2026-05-28T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://brandonhon.github.io/press-start/blog/boring-deploy/ <p>Somewhere along the way we decided that shipping software should feel important. War rooms. Go/no-go calls. A Slack channel named after a hurricane.</p> <p>I would like to make the unfashionable case that the best deploy is the one nobody remembers.</p> <h2 id="unremarkable-tuesdays">Unremarkable Tuesdays</h2> <p>A boring deploy is not a lazy deploy. It is the opposite — it is the deploy that has had all of its drama removed in advance, on purpose, by people who did the unglamorous work of making rollback a single button.</p> <p>When the release is boring, the interesting work moves back to where it belongs: the product, the users, the thing you were trying to build before the ceremony swallowed it.</p> <p>Ship on a Tuesday. Forget you did it. That is the goal.</p> 2026-05-04T00:00:00+00:00 2026-05-04T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://brandonhon.github.io/press-start/blog/fast-apprentice/ <p>The first time it wrote a hundred lines that compiled on the first try, I felt the specific vertigo of a craftsman watching an apprentice move faster than he ever did. Then I read the hundred lines, and the vertigo passed.</p> <h2 id="fast-is-not-the-same-as-right">Fast is not the same as right</h2> <p>An apprentice who is fast but green needs the same thing a slow one does: review, context, and a master who knows which corners must never be cut. The speed changes the rhythm of the work, not its responsibility.</p> <p>I keep two eyes open. One watches what it builds. The other watches what it assumes — because the assumptions are where the quiet bugs live, and a fast apprentice can plant a great many of them before lunch.</p> <blockquote> <p>Hand it the soldering iron. Stay in the room.</p> </blockquote> <p>Used this way it is the best tool I have picked up in years. Used the other way — eyes closed, trust unearned — it is a very fast way to make a mess.</p>