Ledger
Internal platform · Northlight
A schema registry and migration runner that took database changes at Northlight from a weekly release-train ritual to something any engineer ships on a Tuesday afternoon.
Jonathan Chien
Product engineer in the Bay Area. I build software that stays understandable after the people who wrote it move on.
Currently leading platform work at Northlight, where I look after the systems our product teams build on. Before that: developer tools, a stint in fintech infrastructure, and one startup that did not survive contact with the market.
Selected projects
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Tideline
Open source · 2.1k stars
A terminal dashboard for reading distributed traces without leaving the shell. Built it for myself during an outage; it turned out a lot of people wanted the same thing.
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Quarry
Side project
A reading tool that turns saved articles into a weekly digest, with full-text search over everything you have ever saved. Roughly 400 people use it; I still use it every day.
Recent writing
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The migration that took eighteen months
We moved forty services off one shared database. Here is what actually made it survivable, and the two things I would do differently.
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Boring code is a gift to your future self
The cleverest code I ever wrote saved four lines and cost a colleague two hours. A short argument for writing the obvious thing.
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What I learned shutting down a company
Foundry died in 2021. Five years on, here is what I think actually went wrong — and what I got right without knowing it.
Elsewhere
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything, and I answer most things within a few days. You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.