Blogs on Tyler Stapler's Personal Website

Building a Second Brain for Engineering Work

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How I use Zettelkasten, Logseq, and a custom sync tool to build a permanent, connected knowledge base from my engineering work.

The Reading List I Give Every Software Engineering Mentee

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A curated reading list for software engineers at every career stage, with personal context on what to read and when.

Structured Concurrency is a Footgun for Mixed-Experience Teams

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The concurrency model you choose is an implicit contract with your entire team. Kotlin coroutines are brilliant engineering — but they make a promise the JVM’s type system cannot enforce, and the failure modes are silent, gradual, and catastrophic. Here’s why we deprecated Reactor the week virtual threads hit GA, and what we’d tell ourselves before we started.

Manifest-Driven Development: My AI Workflow After a Year of Getting It Wrong

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every new AI session starts from scratch. After a year of losing context, polluting implementations with planning debates, and watching insights evaporate between sessions, I built a structured workflow to fix all of it.

When Drives Go Bad: My Ceph Cluster Rescue Mission

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Practical guide to identifying failed OSDs, mapping physical drives, and monitoring recovery in Ceph clusters

Beating Powerline Interference with MoCA (The Powerline Effect)

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A real-world case study diagnosing and solving mysterious network latency issues caused by powerline interference, with performance benchmarks comparing MoCA vs powerline solutions

My Kubernetes Home Lab

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes is a highly modular container platform open sourced by Google. Google modeled Kubernetes after Borg , the container platform that has powered Google services for over 10 years. My current company, Workiva , now uses Kubernetes to run thousands of microservices on AWS. This blog post will walk through how anyone can run a powerful Kubernetes cluster out of their home.

The Dream

Workiva evaluated using Kubernetes to power its infrastructure platform in 2017. The team decided against adopting it right away, but the project sparked my interest Kubernetes. Programming projects have always been a way for me to learn new concepts and sharpen my programming skills. In the past I didn’t always share these projects with the world. Hosting web apps can be expensive and complicated to manage. Figuring out hosting didn’t feel worth the effort for a toy problem. After learning more about Kubernetes, I was inspired to build a cluster which could host my programming projects and other fun software.