Nguyen Le PhongNguyen Le Phong
Résumé

Writing

Blog

Deep-dives on software architecture and the way source code is structured — written to be understood by beginners, yet useful to teams shipping at scale. Diagrams, real examples, no hand-waving.

Latest articles — Page 15 of 23

204 articles

AI & The Future

Your Fear of AI Is the Size of Your Ambition: Why It’s Time to Aim Dramatically Bigger

Two people can look at the same AI breakthrough and feel opposite things — terror or fuel — and the difference reveals something uncomfortable: our fear of the future is roughly the size of our ambition. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you do, a machine that does it cheaper is frightening. If your plan is to build something dramatically bigger, it’s the best news you’ve ever gotten. This is a clear, energising case for retiring “don’t boil the ocean,” trading the 1.05x present for the 10x future, and why — through ephemeralization and the Jevons paradox — raising your ambitions tends to create more, not less.

11 min read
Engineering Culture

From Software Engineer to Technical Manager: The Counterintuitive Things You Learn

Moving from Software Engineer to Technical Manager isn’t a bigger version of the same job — it’s a quiet rewrite of the very habits that made you good at the last one. Step back from the IDE to see architecture, people, and process, and three surprising truths come into focus: code is an asset and a liability at once, your value shifts from addition to multiplication, and delegation is simple to say but genuinely hard to let go of. A practical, honest reflection for senior engineers eyeing the lead role — and for new managers still reaching for the keyboard.

12 min read
AI & The Future

From SDLC to ADLC: How AI Agents Are Rewriting the Software Development Lifecycle

Software development is going through its biggest shift since the graphical interface. The phases engineers once ran by hand — planning, coding, testing, deployment — are increasingly executed by AI agents working in parallel. This is a clear, visual guide to the move from the classic SDLC to the emerging ADLC (Agentic Development Life Cycle): the two lifecycles drawn side by side, the six concrete shifts happening right now, what the early numbers suggest, what it actually means for an engineer’s day-to-day, and five low-risk best practices to start moving faster — without handing over the judgment that still has to be yours.

15 min read
Ways of Working

How Software Teams Really Work: Big Corp vs Startup vs Outsourcing

Two engineers with the same title can have completely different jobs — because the environment shapes the work far more than the title does. This is a field guide to the three worlds most software careers move through: big corp, startup, and outsourcing, compared along the dimensions that actually change day to day — where work comes from, who decides, how heavy the process is, how much you own, how you communicate, the pace and quality bar, and what gets rewarded. With a full comparison table and an honest guide to which environment suits you.

19 min read
Ways of Working

Working in a Big Corp: Alignment, Process, and Getting Things Done at Scale

Joining a big company from a smaller one is a culture shock: you control very little of the system, and it works brilliantly anyway. That's the design — an enterprise optimises for scale and reliability, not your individual speed. This deep-dive explains how to work well inside the machine: where your work fits in the planning hierarchy, why alignment (not coding) is the real senior job, which process is earned and which is theatre, how to actually ship through review chains, the healthy side of stakeholders and politics, the failure modes that grind people down, and how to grow up a clear career ladder.

18 min read
Ways of Working

Working in a Startup: Speed, Ambiguity, and Wearing Many Hats

The startup promise — real ownership, ship today, watch it matter tomorrow — is largely true, but the recruiting page leaves out the ambiguity, whiplash, and instability that come from the same root cause: a startup is a company still searching for its business. This deep-dive is an honest guide to the trade, across small and mid-size startups: why speed of learning beats polish, what wide-and-shallow ownership really feels like, how to treat ambiguity as the work itself, taking technical debt consciously, communicating before knowledge-in-heads bites, the disorienting small-to-mid transition when process reappears, the failure modes (burnout, hero culture, whiplash), and how to thrive and grow.

18 min read
Ways of Working

Working in Outsourcing & Software Services: Clients, Scope, and Delivery on Contract

Outsourcing is the most misunderstood of the three worlds — not a faceless code factory but, in a good services firm, a place where you build real products across more domains in two years than most product engineers touch in ten. The catch: you don't own the product, you deliver against a contract, and a second skill sits beside the engineering — managing the client relationship. This deep-dive covers the structural fact that reshapes everything, the two shapes of outsourcing work, why scope is sacred and the change request is your friend, billing and estimates and utilization, communication as a deliverable, time zones, quality under contract, the failure modes, and how to thrive and grow a services career.

19 min read
AI & The Future

AI Agents, Explained Without the Hype: What They Are, How They Work, and What They Can Do for You

Everyone is suddenly talking about “AI agents” — software that doesn’t just answer your questions but actually goes off and does the work. But what is an agent really, how is it different from the chatbot you already use, and where does it genuinely help versus quietly create a mess? This is a friendly, jargon-light guide for everyone, tech or not: the simple loop every agent runs, the five ingredients that make one, the levels of autonomy from co-pilot to auto-pilot, down-to-earth examples at the office and at home, the failure modes to watch for, and a concrete way to put your first useful agent to work this week.

17 min read
AI & The Future

From Prompts to Workflows: Designing AI Workflows That Save You Hours Every Week

Most people use AI one question at a time — and leave most of its value on the table. The real leverage isn’t a clever prompt; it’s a repeatable AI workflow: a small chain of steps you design once and reuse forever, turning a recurring two-hour chore into a two-minute review. This is a practical, example-rich guide for everyone, tech or not: the difference between a prompt and a workflow, the simple anatomy every workflow shares, ready-to-steal workflows for the office and for everyday life, the three levels from manual to fully automatic, a six-step way to design your own, and a back-of-the-envelope way to prove the time you’re actually saving.

18 min read