A Brazilian engineer building and writing from Vancouver.
I'm Tiarê Balbi Bonamini. I've written software since 2008, across three countries — São Paulo, Dublin, and now Vancouver — and spent most of that time on the backend: JVM services, distributed systems, and the failure modes that only appear once real traffic arrives.
This site is the other half of that work. What you learn today is gone tomorrow, so I write to make it last — study notes and post-mortems worked into essays, one every Monday.
Right now
- Building a deterministic simulation harness in Rust — how much of a distributed system's behaviour can you pin down before it ever runs?
- Writing a series on staying in control of AI-assisted development: handoff size, review discipline, what "productivity" actually costs.
- Keeping the tech radar current. It's the honest version of this page — what I'm actually trying, trusting, and moving on from.
Last updated: September 2026
How I work
Build to learn
The fastest way to understand a system is to build a small, honest version of it. Most of my posts start as a crash test in a side project — the kind you can break on purpose, at 3am, with nobody paged.
Write to retain
If I can't explain it on the page, I don't understand it yet. The post is the proof — and it outlives the project that produced it.
Engineer for the long run
Clever is cheap; durable is hard. I optimize for systems that survive their own failures, and for code the next person can pick up without an archaeology dig.
Read the wire, not the brochure
New tools are easier to trust once you've seen the bytes. I strip frameworks down to the protocol underneath before I commit to them.
Read the essays — or follow the work in progress.
Anything worth arguing about: @tiarebalbi on X