Field notes.
On streaming, infrastructure,
and building systems that last.
Latest writing5 posts
Building Elemental’s cloud platform
From video appliances to a cloud platform: my work at Elemental, the engineering challenges of that transition, and the path to AWS’s 2015 acquisition.
Why I started an ISP in a small Kentucky town
Netscape made the web approachable. Wildcat Internet brought together dial-up access, website hosting, and e-commerce in a small Kentucky town.
Live video leaves no room for guesswork
A live stream makes every dependency visible. Reliability starts with following a segment all the way to the viewer.
Latency starts with the shape of a request
Putting content closer to people helps. Making that content reusable determines how often the shorter path actually works.
Infrastructure should be easy to reason about
The next engineer should be able to explain a request, diagnose a failure, and change the system with confidence.