Welcome — glad you’re here.

I’m John Reed, and I’ve spent 28 years building and running infrastructure — SysAdmin to Cloud Architect, by way of a lot of 2 a.m. pages. A good chunk of those years went to getting distributed databases to agree with each other: Galera clusters, sharded MariaDB, replication that has to heal itself. So when I named this blog Eventually Consistent, it wasn’t only a cute distributed- systems joke. It’s the actual shape of the work — given enough time and enough writes, the nodes converge. Opinions do too. So, it turns out, does good engineering.

This is where I write up what I build and the tech worth explaining: cryptography, distributed systems, infrastructure-as-code, and the agentic tooling I now lean on every day. That last part is the throughline: after nearly three decades doing this by hand, I’m all-in on building with AI — not as a party trick, but on real Terraform, real architecture, real production. I’ll show you what that looks like up close, the wins and the faceplants both.

What to expect

  • Project write-ups — what I built, why, and what broke.
  • Deep dives — Zen & the art of technology, people and tech, architecture, IaC patterns, other nerdery.
  • Tooling — the small things that make the work faster (including plugins I’ve shipped, like Cairn).

It supports the things I need

Code, with copy buttons and syntax highlighting:

// low-S normalization: half the malleability problem, gone.
if s.Cmp(halfN) == 1 {
    s = new(big.Int).Sub(order, s)
}

Inline code, callouts, tables, and a table of contents on longer posts.

More to come…