Stacklog
Stacklog is a one-person blog about the parts of software engineering that don't fit neatly into a conference talk: what things actually cost, what breaks at 2 a.m., and which tools are worth the money versus which ones are worth the hype. I started it in 2019 after one too many Slack threads where I'd typed out a long explanation of something and thought, "I should just write this down somewhere public."
I'm Maya Ferris. By day I'm a senior backend engineer; I've spent twelve years working on systems that have to stay up, mostly at mid-sized companies that couldn't afford to get paged casually. I've run production databases, migrated observability stacks, built on-call rotations, and personally felt the pain of every pricing tier change a vendor has ever shipped. This blog is where that experience goes when it isn't going into a postmortem doc at work.
What you'll find here
Three kinds of posts, roughly:
- Infrastructure and tooling write-ups — migrations, cost breakdowns, "we tried X so you don't have to."
- Hardware posts about the stuff on and under my desk, from NAS builds to keyboard switches, written for people who like specifics, not marketing copy.
- Engineering history and craft pieces — the boring, durable knowledge that doesn't get less useful as frameworks change.
How posts get made
Every post on Stacklog starts from something I actually did: a migration I ran, a part list I bought, a bug I chased. I don't accept sponsored posts, and when I link to a product it's because I used it, not because someone sent me a PR kit. If I mention pricing, it's what I paid or what was listed at the time of writing — vendors change tiers often enough that you should always check current pricing yourself before buying anything.
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach me is the newsletter reply-to address, or find me wherever engineers argue about text editors. I read everything, even if I'm slow to reply during on-call weeks.