About

Hello. My name is Peter Wellingham. I've been a software engineer since 2008, working mostly on backend systems for European fintech and B2B SaaS companies. I've been writing here since 2009, which makes this blog older than my career as a full-time engineer.

I currently live in a village in Limburg, in the south of the Netherlands, having moved out of Amsterdam in 2023 after about a decade in the city. I work distributed for an international team. I have a wife, two cats, and a workshop where I'm slowly building a workbench from oak salvaged from an old shipping company.

What this site is about

Mostly software engineering — the parts of it that I find worth writing down. Postgres internals, Go conventions, the operational realities of distributed systems, and occasional rants about technologies I dislike. Sometimes I write about books, gardening, or whatever else is on my mind. I don't run ads or sponsorships, and I have no plans to start.

The technology

This site is hand-written HTML and CSS, with no JavaScript. The CSS is about 200 lines. The site is generated by a small Go program I wrote in 2018 that converts a directory of Markdown files into the pages you're reading. I have rewritten the program once, in 2022, when I got bored.

What I'm reading

If you want a representative sample of the kind of thinking that's influenced me, here are a few books I've reread in the last year:

Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann — the book I most frequently recommend.
A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout — short, opinionated, mostly right.
Working in Public by Nadia Asparouhova — not a software book exactly, but the best thing I've read about how open source actually works.
The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb — for a break from software.

Getting in touch

The best way to reach me is by email, at peter [at] this domain. I read everything I get and reply to most of it, though it may take me a few days. I do not have public profiles on social media of any consequence, by deliberate choice.

If you want to comment on a specific post, that's the way to do it. I publish thoughtful corrections at the bottom of relevant posts, with attribution unless you'd rather I didn't.