Aaron Held Engineering & craft

Documentation with video beats mermaid???

Since the cost and effort required to create video has been dramatically decreasing over the last few years I’ve been using it more and more to explain system architectures. To show the impact it can have I took some time to document my hobby project - https://marketfinder.us. The way it harvests the data (pun fully intended) is interesting, and has lots of checkpoints and observation opportunities that make this type of system something I can operate solo. ...

July 13, 2026 · 9 min · Aaron Held

Practical Hypermedia for our post ORM world

This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a drunk the cool aid, I’ve setup a stand beside my desk. I look back and try to understand where my initial negative reaction came from. I realized that many of the examples were trivial and did not demonstrate the reality of what hypermedia brings to the table. ...

September 29, 2012 · 8 min · Aaron Held

Designing a new Infrastructure is like buying a new car

Because I happen to be both buying a new car and deploying new infrastructure the realization dawned upon me about how similar these two activities are. You start the investigation with some preconceived “gut-level” notions. code: Multiprocess distributed job engine is what I need car : I want a Mazda 3 with “Zoom Zoom” Everybody has a story about why your choice is bad code: “In my last job I used a python-C++ wrapper from vcron” car : My cousin"s friends brother had a mazda and the engine fell out on 95 ...

June 17, 2009 · 3 min · Aaron Held