About

I’m L. Tong, a software engineer based in Los Angeles, California. This site is where I write down the thinking that does not fit in a pull request description.

Most of my work sits at the boundaries: between services that were never designed to talk to each other, between the system as documented and the system as it actually runs, between what a team decided two years ago and what it needs now. That work is rarely photogenic and almost never has a clean answer, which is exactly why it’s worth writing about.

What you’ll find here

Long pieces come out when an idea has earned the length — usually something I’ve argued about at work for weeks and finally understand well enough to explain. Shorter field notes come out more often: a single observation, a tool that changed how I work, a mistake worth naming.

Four running threads organise everything:Engineering for the how,Systems for the why things behave the way they do, Craft for taste and tooling, andField Notes for the rest.

How this site is built

Astro, static output, no analytics and no third-party scripts. Type is Newsreader for editorial text and Inter for interface chrome. The whole thing is a folder of markdown files, which is the point: it should still build in ten years.

There’s an RSS feed if you’d rather not rely on me remembering to post about new writing.

Getting in touch

Email is best: hello@ltong.me. I read everything, and I answer most things, though sometimes slowly. You can also find me on X and GitHub.