Write-ups and working notes: technical posts, book reviews, hikes, and other thoughts.https://mattbalshaw.com/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/piranha-flinger/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/piranha-flinger/Steffi's first ever fishing session ends with four piranhas in the bucket, one bouncing off my chest, and the catch served with lime for dinner.Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelperuamazonfishinghttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/mud-dance-party/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/mud-dance-party/A craft afternoon in the Peruvian Amazon turns into hours of carnival dancing in the mud, always twenty minutes from a tree cutting we never saw.Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelperuamazoncarnivalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/caiman-magic-trick/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/caiman-magic-trick/On a night boat ride through firefly-covered Amazon water, our guide revealed a baby caiman he had caught without either of us noticing a thing.Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelperuamazonhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/swimming-in-bioluminescence/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/swimming-in-bioluminescence/A stranger's tip sends us back to a Galapagos bay at night, where Matt swims through glowing blue plankton under the Milky Way.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelgalapagosecuadorhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/huacachina-dunes/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/huacachina-dunes/Climbing, buggying and belly-boarding the giant dunes of Huacachina, until the desert followed us home in our shoes.Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelperuhuacachinadeserthttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/snow-drift-rescue-chain/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/snow-drift-rescue-chain/Getting the van stuck in an Icelandic snow drift, and the chain of strangers who dug us out.Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelicelandhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/magic-marketing-ai/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/magic-marketing-ai/Built the backend for Magic Marketing, a paid AI marketing tool for podcasters, as a fast MVP, then rewrote it as v2 when the client's feature requests outgrew the prototype architecture.Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsaillmstripehttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/iceland-hot-river/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/iceland-hot-river/Finding a hidden hot river in the Icelandic highlands, then freezing our shorts solid.Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestravelicelandhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/dead-sea-float/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/dead-sea-float/Floating like a cork in the Dead Sea at the lowest point on earth.Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestraveljordandead-seahttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/wadi-rum-jeep/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/wadi-rum-jeep/A jeep day in Wadi Rum with a Bedouin guide, where every stop comes with tea.Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestraveljordanwadi-rumhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/petra-dog/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/petra-dog/A stray dog leads us through the dark Siq to an empty Treasury at sunrise.Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTAdventurestraveljordanpetrahttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/godel-escher-bach/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/godel-escher-bach/A long climb worth making.Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/why-greatness-cannot-be-planned/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/why-greatness-cannot-be-planned/A great idea, a repetitive book.Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/sapiens/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/sapiens/Even better than Homo Deus.Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/designing-data-intensive-applications/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/designing-data-intensive-applications/Dry, despite the reputation.Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/ai-snake-oil/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/ai-snake-oil/Seeing through the hype.Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/test-driven-development/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/test-driven-development/One great tip, not much else.Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/nexus/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/nexus/A history book wearing an AI cover.Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/global-ip-ratelimiter/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/global-ip-ratelimiter/Shipped a from-scratch IP rate limiter for the Goodpods API in one day to shut down aggressive bot scraping, catching a load balancer IP bug in development before it could throttle every real user.Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodssecurityredisfastapihttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/db-connection-pool-firefight/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/db-connection-pool-firefight/A production connection-exhaustion incident on Cloud Run: pool tuning bought time, then the worker-times-instances arithmetic pointed to the real fix with a read replica.Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodscloud-runcloud-sqlpostgresincidentshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/what-we-owe-the-future/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/what-we-owe-the-future/Longtermism without the preaching.Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-gene/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-gene/Genetics turned into a story.Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/scattered-minds/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/scattered-minds/Eye opening on ADHD.Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/subprime-attention-crisis/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/subprime-attention-crisis/Online ads as the next 2008.Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/biobuilder/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/biobuilder/Synthetic biology you can actually do.Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/whats-our-problem/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/whats-our-problem/Politics for people who like technical specifics.Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/introduction-to-system-design/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/introduction-to-system-design/Copy pasted in places, skippable overall.Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/feed-query-rewrite/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/feed-query-rewrite/Replaced the exact-ranking feed query behind Goodpods' For You screen with a cheap sampled version, taking p50 latency from 1900ms to 110ms.Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodspostgresperformancesqlhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/native-audio-player-rebuild/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/native-audio-player-rebuild/As a web engineer I wrote a native podcast player for iOS and Android with queues, background playback and lock screen controls, and bridged it to our TypeScript app.Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsswiftandroidcapacitoraudiohttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/my-stroke-of-insight/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/my-stroke-of-insight/Two thirds great, one third not.Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/offline-downloads/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/offline-downloads/Built episode downloads and a persistent React Query cache so the Goodpods app worked with no connection.Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodscapacitorreact-queryofflinehttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/request-monitoring-1m/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/request-monitoring-1m/With no observability budget, I built request monitoring into Redis for an API doing over 1M requests a day, then used it to find and fix the ten slowest endpoints.Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsredismonitoringperformancehttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/capacitor-native-app-foundation/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/capacitor-native-app-foundation/How I turned one Next.js codebase into the iOS and Android apps for Goodpods and retired an entire React Native codebase.Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodscapacitornextjsmobilefirebase-authhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/listen-stats-player-reliability/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/listen-stats-player-reliability/Built fragment-level listen analytics across the Goodpods app, then fixed the resume bugs that made the player jump back to the start, cutting support complaints to zero.Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsmobileaudioanalyticshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/prefetch-revert/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/prefetch-revert/My first prefetch deploy maxed out the Goodpods backend's autoscaling, so I reverted it from production the same day and re-shipped a more surgical version.Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsperformanceprefetchingfrontendhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/listen-fragments-model/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/listen-fragments-model/Migrated Goodpods' core listen data to a fragment model that captured partial and resumed listens, kept old clients working via daily aggregation, and unlocked podcaster analytics and listen-time leaderboards.Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsdata-modelmigrationanalyticshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/why-we-sleep/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/why-we-sleep/The book that made me do a full 180.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/thinking-in-systems/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/thinking-in-systems/A lens for the whole world.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-psychology-of-money/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-psychology-of-money/Be reasonable, not rational.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-design-of-everyday-things/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-design-of-everyday-things/Read it already.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-cuckoos-egg/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-cuckoos-egg/A real hacker hunt from the early internet.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/cant-hurt-me/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/cant-hurt-me/Get okay with failing.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/beyond-good-and-evil/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/beyond-good-and-evil/Really, insanely dense.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/atomic-habits/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/atomic-habits/The best resource on habits, and a masterclass in format.Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/nextjs-caching-firefight/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/nextjs-caching-firefight/A multi-month fight to get stale-while-revalidate working on the Goodpods webapp without pages caching forever or deploys serving a stale app.Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsnextjsnginxcachingperformancehttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/alembic-in-production/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/alembic-in-production/A practical guide to running Alembic database migrations from your first revision through to CI/CD and production.Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalalembicdatabasespythonmigrationshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-emperor-of-all-maladies/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-emperor-of-all-maladies/A biography of cancer that earns the title.Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-book/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-book/An antidote to nihilism.Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/never-split-the-difference/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/never-split-the-difference/Negotiation lessons that read like a thriller.Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/masters-of-doom/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/masters-of-doom/A really great startup story.Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/mans-search-for-meaning/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/mans-search-for-meaning/A classic anyone would benefit from reading.Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/kill-it-with-fire/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/kill-it-with-fire/The best software book I'd read in a long time.Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/seo-structured-data/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/seo-structured-data/Server-rendering structured data and real page content took Goodpods from a few dozen organic clicks a week to over 1000.Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsseossrnextjshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/curated-lists-feature/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/curated-lists-feature/Built the curated lists feature across the Goodpods native app in about ten days; users created 1,000 lists within the first ten days after release.Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsmobilefeature-deliverysharinghttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/refactoring-ui/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/refactoring-ui/Two hours to noticeably better web design.Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/deep-work/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/deep-work/Readable, enjoyable, and mostly forgotten a few months later.Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/ssr-performance-push/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/ssr-performance-push/A five-month Core Web Vitals campaign on the Goodpods Next.js webapp that lifted Lighthouse from 20-30 to 95 and improved search rankings.Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsnextjsperformanceseossrhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/infinite-cache-ssr/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/infinite-cache-ssr/I designed a Redis stale-while-revalidate cache for Goodpods' SSR pages, gated to crawlers only, that cut response times from 2-5 seconds to around 100ms.Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsrediscachingseohttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/meditations/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/meditations/A Roman emperor's private journal, not a book.Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/introducing-go/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/introducing-go/Just watch YouTube instead.Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/12-rules-for-life/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/12-rules-for-life/Good moments, wandering tangents.Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/robust-python/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/robust-python/The book that sold me on type hints.Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/using-asyncio-in-python/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/using-asyncio-in-python/The book that finally made the event loop click.Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-mythical-man-month/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/the-mythical-man-month/Software is grown, not constructed.Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/rationality/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/rationality/Fine, but outclassed by its own references.Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/clean-code/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/clean-code/Worth doing your job properly.Sun, 26 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalbookstechnicalhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/designing-the-mind/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/designing-the-mind/If I could only have read one book in 2021.Sun, 11 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMTNon-fiction Reviewsbooksnon-fictionhttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/detox-e2e-then-removed/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/detox-e2e-then-removed/After a team reduction left us without full-time QA, I set up Detox end-to-end tests on CI, ran them for eighteen months, then removed them when the evidence showed they were not worth their maintenance cost.Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsreact-nativetestingcihttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/django-to-fastapi-migration/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/django-to-fastapi-migration/Proposed and led a parallel rewrite of a failing Django backend to FastAPI, taking the platform from 50 to 1500 concurrent users.Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsfastapipythonscalinghttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/async-task-queue-workers/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/async-task-queue-workers/Replaced a high-maintenance Celery setup with an RQ worker fleet on Redis, with priority queues and per-podcast fault tolerance, cutting notification-triggering actions from 5 seconds to 80ms.Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodsredispythonbackground-jobshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/cicd-pipeline-buildout/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/cicd-pipeline-buildout/How I took the Goodpods API from live-editing production over FileZilla and weekly outages to a tested, three-environment pipeline with near-daily deploys.Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalstargoodpodscicdtestingdevopshttps://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/realistic-speed-reading/https://mattbalshaw.com/field-notes/realistic-speed-reading/A three-pass method for speed reading non-fiction without losing what matters.Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 GMTTechnicalreadingproductivitylearning