Source & Architecture
System Design Interviews Begin With Clarifying Requirements
A practical guide to the first minutes of a System Design Interview: clarify users, scale, core flows, constraints, and trade-offs before choosing tools.
Blog
Writing from building software and leading teams: architecture, AI in everyday engineering, and how teams actually ship. Some are short essays, some are long guides. Career and life reflections live in Notes.
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- Monolith, Modular Monolith, Microservices: An Honest Decision GuideThe signals that tell you a split is worth its operating cost, and the ones that say not yet.
- The Outbox PatternKeeping the database and published events in step when one service has to write both.
- You Can't Fix What You Can't See: Logs, Metrics, Traces, and SLOs at ScaleLogs, metrics, traces and SLOs, and how an error budget keeps on-call sustainable.
- Working in a Big Corp: Alignment, Process, and Getting Things Done at ScaleHow work moves through planning, review and alignment when many teams share one system.
- Office Politics Without Losing Your PrinciplesGetting a sound proposal decided when incentives, timing and ownership pull different ways.
- Cognitive Debt in AI-Assisted Development: When Code Grows Faster Than UnderstandingWhat a team can do when AI writes code faster than people can review and run it.
Latest articles
Ways of Working
Turning Review Evidence Into Team Memory
A practical note on converting review findings, commands, screenshots, and decisions into reusable team memory instead of one-time approval artifacts.
Perspectives & Field Notes
What Thirty Days of Small Notes Can Teach
A reflective note on how a month of small daily observations can reveal patterns that are easy to miss in the middle of work.
AI & The Future
Letting AI Speed Up the Search, Not the Judgment
A practical reflection on using AI to broaden investigation while keeping source checking, trade-off decisions, and accountability with people.
Engineering Culture
Protecting Attention in a Busy Team
A calm note on treating attention as a shared team resource, not an infinite personal budget that people can recover alone.
Source & Architecture
Designing Defaults That Fail Safely
A practical reflection on choosing defaults that protect users and systems when configuration, rollout, or external dependency behavior is uncertain.
Ways of Working
Making Handoffs Honest About What Is Unknown
A practical note on writing handoffs that include open questions, assumptions, and risk instead of pretending the work is more certain than it is.
Perspectives & Field Notes
The Quiet Discipline of Finishing Properly
A reflective note on the small discipline of closing work with evidence, cleanup, and context instead of only reaching the visible finish line.
AI & The Future
Asking AI to Name Its Assumptions
A practical reflection on making AI-assisted work safer by asking the model to expose assumptions before accepting its answer.
Read by series
Foundations of Software Architecture
A practical path through code boundaries, dependency direction, distributed systems, resilience, data, and the trade-offs that appear as software grows.
Ways of Working
A field guide to how software work changes across large companies, startups and outsourcing teams, and how ownership, process and pace change with it.
AI in Practice
Grounded guides to agents, repeatable workflows, useful trends, everyday ideas, and the checks that keep AI output tied to evidence.
Kind & Effective Engineering
Practical habits for code review, pull requests, feedback, and mentoring that improve the work without losing care for the people doing it.
Lean Business Analysis
A calm path from value and stakeholder questions to models, requirements, traceability, rollout, and checking whether a solution actually helped.
Data in the EOS Operating System
Four reflections on using a small, owned set of numbers to see operating health earlier, from the Scorecard and role measurables to revenue, profit and cash.
Leadership and Management
Reflections on direction, craft, clear messages, ambiguity, and the difference between pushing people and helping meaningful work pull them forward.
Browse by topic
Source & Architecture
How to structure source code so it survives growth, teams, and change.
42 articlesEngineering Culture
The human side of building software — reviews, feedback, mentorship, and teams that grow people instead of burning them out.
41 articlesAI & The Future
Making sense of AI — from context engineering to building reliable, production-ready AI products.
40 articlesPerspectives & Field Notes
Personal reflections from work, learning, people, and the quiet moments that shape a career.
31 articlesWays of Working
How software teams actually operate and work together — from Agile and Scrum to how delivery really happens in big corps, startups, and outsourcing.
50 articles