theflyingcoders is one platform architect, writing in the open.

I’m Mark Smith. I’ve spent 10 years on backend platforms, mostly Go, mostly the services other teams quietly depend on. The “we” everywhere else on this site is deliberate: engagements sometimes bring in people I’ve worked with for years. The person answering your mail is still me.

Most of my work sits in three places: building backend services from scratch, helping teams keep their engineering standards while working much faster with AI, and untangling systems that have been in production long enough to grow opinions. The blog is where the reasoning lives. If you want to know how I’d approach your problem, the honest answer is that it’s spread across the archive.