Christian Emmer

Having a clear goal will increase the effectiveness of your technical writing.

Shifting the discussion left causes outside contributions to have a higher acceptance rate.

PostgreSQL has the ability to monitor the progress of index creation, which is very helpful for long-running queries.

You can restrict how often a command executes by remembering its last execution time.

You should not ship changes that you aren't confident in.

If an alert isn't important enough to wake me up at 2 a.m., then it isn't important enough to interrupt my working hours.

When (not if) your service dies, do you have an EKG to tell you so?

It's easy to see the growth of a tree in hindsight by cutting it down and measuring its rings.

What I'm thankful for in my career in 2025.

No, it's not a Ricky Martin song.

Unlike typical programming languages, Bash doesn't terminate when it encounters a variety of exceptions.

I don't care if you're a 10x engineer, I care if we can build great things together.

Stakeholders love this one simple trick.

SELECT COUNT(*) requires an expensive full index scan, which probably isn't what you want.

Homebrew makes it very difficult to install older versions of a cask.

Pinning third-party GitHub Actions to a commit SHA helps protect you against supply chain attacks.

Homebrew makes it very difficult to install older versions of a formula.

I spent a substantial amount of time in the first half of 2025 ensuring that I don't have to think about microservices my team owns that have a low rate of change.

Sometimes you need to change the working directory in a shell function.

How to copy uncommitted changes from one clone to another of the same repository.