The Meridian Journal

Occasional essays on networks, software, and the people who build them
September 2026 · Networks

Why latency budgets matter more than bandwidth

Most performance work starts in the wrong place: the link. In practice the perceived speed of a service is dominated by round trips, not throughput...

August 2026 · Software

The quiet return of boring architecture

After a decade of microservice maximalism, teams are rediscovering that a well-factored monolith behind a reverse proxy covers most real workloads...

July 2026 · Notes

On running your own hardware in 2026

Colocation pricing has barely moved while cloud bills kept climbing. A short look at when owning the box still makes sense...