David Merrick

Rope-a-dope for distributed systems — event-driven patterns that don't just survive autonomous agents, but get stronger under the beating.

How my personal AI went from a flat-file monorepo to a Kafka microservice architecture in my basement.

Five rules for working agentically: plan first, test upfront, manage cognitive overhead, verify continuously, and keep the work human-readable.

A new house, an appliance dragon named Smaug, 200 sensors, and the eighteen-agent Fellowship I built to keep them all under control.

Dead zones, Comcast outages during the workday, a coworker with spare gear, and a full enterprise-grade rebuild of my home network.

I adopted two cats this spring — a brother-and-sister pair from Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood.

One route up Agentic Mountain: what I learned coding with AI agents, and why it's good for humans.

From a small Panel-1 install to a whole-home battery system: 11 EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultras hauled back from Idaho, $15k cash on ~$42k of MSRP, $15,926 back from the IRS, and a Death Star joke that named the whole thing.

Notion printing is awful.

Apple Passwords is great, but lacking several key features that 1Password has

Cycling trip with my dad and sister along the Danube from Germany to Austria

A weekend backpacking trip to Ice Lake, in the Wallowas

A chill last week of sabbatical in Vietnam and South Korea

I spent the third week of my sabbatical exploring northern Vietnam and on a cruise in Ha Long Bay

A week of exploring central Vietnam

My Vietnam visa was denied at the gate, but I managed to salvage the trip and spend a few days in Japan and Taiwan while waiting for a new one to get processed.

Upscaling old 480p video to 4k using Topaz Labs Video AI.

Some useful tips for working with text in IntelliJ.

I returned home from a recent trip to my parents' place with a box full of old tapes.

I decided to create a more robust data backup strategy for my family in early 2023.

Use macOS's quick right-click action to convert HEIC to JPEG.

Google Photos's web UI isn't always great for people searches, but there are hidden parameters you can pass to make it behave more like it does on mobile.

The Epson FastFoto is a blazing-fast scanner for digitizing your family's memories.

A few favorite travels, books, movies, podcasts, and games from 2022, in no particular order 🙂

Highlights from a December 2022 trip to Costa Rica with my girlfriend.

In September 2022, my dad and I did rode the length of the Trail of the Couer d'Alenes, in Idaho.