// Personal Blog
Writing about software engineering, backend systems, DNS infrastructure, and the frontier of AI.
Traditional DNS is a 40-year-old system built for a different internet. Here's what happens when you strip out the registrars, the ICANN gatekeeping, and the single points of failure — and replace them with cryptographic ownership.
Read ArticleA practical look at integrating large language models into real engineering workflows — the wins, the footguns, and the things that still need a human.
Read more Backend · April 2025What IBM's enterprise infrastructure taught me about building systems that degrade gracefully instead of collapsing catastrophically.
Read more DNS · March 2025Every DNS engineer eventually learns that TTL is more of a suggestion than a rule. Here's what's actually happening under the hood.
Read more Software Dev · Feb 2025At a certain level, your impact multiplies through other engineers. Here's how I think about the balance between writing code and shaping systems.
Read more AI · Jan 2025Retrieval-augmented generation sounds simple until you're debugging why your chatbot confidently cited a document from 2019 as current policy.
Read more Backend · Dec 2024A field guide to the versioning approaches I've seen succeed and fail across large engineering organizations — and what I'd do differently.
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I'm Aaron Quirk, a Principal Engineer at Unstoppable Domains, where I work on the infrastructure and systems powering decentralized identity and blockchain-based DNS.
Before that, I spent years at IBM building enterprise-scale backend systems — the kind where a bad deploy affects millions of users and the post-mortem takes longer than the incident.
I write here about the things I'm thinking through: backend architecture, DNS internals, the real-world state of AI in engineering, and what it means to operate at the principal level in a fast-moving company.
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