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Every article and note on this site, grouped by topic. Browse the list, or jump straight to something you remember reading.
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Blog articles
204 articles in 5 categories.
Series
Source & Architecture42
- System Design Interviews Begin With Clarifying Requirements
- Designing Defaults That Fail Safely
- Keeping Data Contracts Small Enough to Trust
- Choosing Boring Boundaries on Purpose
- Designing With Escape Hatches, Not Back Doors
- Making Interfaces Honest About System Limits
- Designing for the Change You Can Actually See
- When Boundaries Need Examples More Than Names
- Keeping Architecture Decisions Small Enough to Revisit
- Designing Interfaces That Outlive Implementations
- Refactoring Toward a Clearer Core
- Architecture Decisions for Future Teammates
- Choosing Boundaries Before Choosing Tools
- Observability as a Design Choice
- The Outbox Pattern
- Do You Need a Service Mesh? Let Production Evidence Decide
- Event Sourcing: A Beginner's Guide
- The Saga Pattern for Distributed Transactions
- API Gateway Patterns
- Hexagonal Architecture in Practice
- Events, Queues, and the Art of Not Calling Each Other: Event-Driven Architecture, Explained
- Who Owns the Data? Database-per-Service, Sagas, and Eventual Consistency Without Tears
- The Distributed-Systems Tax, Paid: Timeouts, Retries, Circuit Breakers, and Idempotency
- Scaling the Database: Indexes, Read Replicas, Caching, and Sharding — In That Order
- You Can't Fix What You Can't See: Logs, Metrics, Traces, and SLOs at Scale
- The True Cost of Microservices
- Ports & Adapters (Hexagonal Architecture), Explained Simply
- Clean, Onion & Hexagonal Architecture: One North Star, Three Names
- Dependency Injection & Inversion of Control, Without the Magic
- Structuring a Codebase: By Layer, By Feature, or By Domain?
- Monolith, Modular Monolith, Microservices: An Honest Decision Guide
- Micro-Frontends: When They're Worth It, and What They Cost
- Layered vs. Vertical Slice Architecture
- Dependency Direction in Plain Language
- Eventual Consistency in the Real World
- CQRS: Command Query Responsibility Segregation
- Serverless: Trade-offs and Truths
- Caching Strategies and Pitfalls
- Database Sharding: When and Why
- GraphQL vs. REST
- Designing Idempotent APIs
- Rate Limiting and Throttling
Engineering Culture41
- Protecting Attention in a Busy Team
- Noticing Friction Before It Becomes Blame
- Making Space for the Quiet Reviewer
- What Calm Ownership Looks Like in Practice
- The Quiet Skill of Asking for Help Early
- Why Good Teams Make Risk Visible Early
- The Culture Hidden in Small Reviews
- How Trust Grows in Ordinary Follow-Through
- The Quiet Discipline of Saying Not Yet
- The Reviewer as a Future Reader
- When Silence in a Team Becomes a Signal
- The Quiet Skill of Asking for Help
- A Calm Script for Difficult Feedback
- Fostering Innovation in Teams
- Office Politics Without Losing Your Principles
- The Difference Between Mentorship and Sponsorship
- Onboarding That Actually Helps New Teammates
- Async Communication for Remote Teams
- Handling Toxic Rockstars
- Hiring for Potential vs. Experience
- From Software Engineer to Technical Manager: The Counterintuitive Things You Learn
- The Art of Code Review: How to Critique Code Without Crushing People
- Kind Engineering: Why Being Kind Makes You a Better Engineer
- How to Write a Pull Request People Actually Enjoy Reviewing
- The Pull Request That Reviewers Can Trust
- Feedback That Lands: Giving and Receiving Critique as an Engineer
- Mentoring Engineers: How to Grow Juniors into Seniors
- Over-Managed and Under-Led: Why a Busy Team Can Still Lose Its Way
- Vision Without Craft: Why Leaders Can't Float Above the Work
- Signals or Messages: The Quiet Cost of Vague Communication
- The Discipline of Sitting With a Problem You Can't Yet Solve
- Pull, Don't Push: Why People Follow Meaning, Not Instructions
- Why "Culture Fit" is Often a Trap
- The Anatomy of a Healthy 1-on-1
- Celebrating Failure
- Building Diverse Engineering Teams
- Managing Up: Communicating with Non-Technical Leadership
- Performance Reviews That Matter
- Handling Burnout Before It Happens
- Creating a Blameless Culture
- Giving Constructive Feedback
AI & The Future40
- Letting AI Speed Up the Search, Not the Judgment
- Asking AI to Name Its Assumptions
- Treating AI Suggestions as Draft Evidence
- Keeping AI Changes Small Enough to Review
- Letting AI Draft the Boring First Pass
- Asking AI to Show Its Working Context
- Letting AI Draft While Humans Keep the Map
- What AI Cannot Know From the Prompt Alone
- Using AI Without Outsourcing Judgment
- AI Tools for Reading a Codebase
- From Prototype Demo to Production Behavior
- Human Feedback Loops for AI Work
- The Cost of Trusting a Fluent AI Answer
- Vector Databases Explained
- AI in Cybersecurity
- Reducing Hallucinations in LLMs
- Fine-Tuning vs. Prompting vs. RAG
- Ethical Considerations in AI Products
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Basics
- The Context Window Bottleneck
- When an AI Answer Needs a Test
- Cognitive Debt in AI-Assisted Development: When Code Grows Faster Than Understanding
- Beyond the Hype: What LLMs Actually Understand
- AI Literacy: From Prompting to Orchestrating Agents
- Your Fear of AI Is the Size of Your Ambition: Why It’s Time to Aim Dramatically Bigger
- From SDLC to ADLC: How AI Agents Are Rewriting the Software Development Lifecycle
- AI Agents, Explained Without the Hype: What They Are, How They Work, and What They Can Do for You
- From Prompts to Workflows: Designing AI Workflows That Save You Hours Every Week
- The AI Trends Worth Your Attention in 2026 — and How to Turn Them Into Real Value
- AI Is Rewiring Every Software Role: How Thinking Changes for BA, PO, PM, Dev, QA and Beyond
- Context Engineering: The Skill That Separates Great AI Users From Everyone Else
- Generative AI in Daily Life and Work: A Practical Catalog of What You Can Use Today
- Prompt Engineering Is Just Communication
- AI in QA: Automated Test Generation
- Running Local LLMs for Privacy
- AI Agents: The Next Frontier
- Data Privacy in the Era of AI
- Multimodal AI: Text, Vision, and Audio
- AI for Code Refactoring
- Evaluating LLM Performance
Perspectives & Field Notes31
- What Thirty Days of Small Notes Can Teach
- The Quiet Discipline of Finishing Properly
- The Small Relief of a Reversible Decision
- The Patience to Let Context Arrive
- When Progress Feels Like Removing Weight
- The Relief of a Well-Named Problem
- A Calm Way to Carry Uncertainty
- The Quiet Cost of Staying Vague
- The Value of a Slower First Answer
- Why Quiet Consistency Compounds
- The Difference Between Confidence and Evidence
- The Note You Return to Later
- The Courage to Write the First Rough Note
- The Loneliness of the Solo Developer
- Learning a New Language Every Year
- Overcoming Analysis Paralysis
- Reading Code Is Harder Than Writing It
- Mentoring Junior Developers Effectively
- The Value of a "Boring" Tech Stack
- Why I Stopped Writing Perfect Code
- Why Preparation Often Looks Invisible
- The First Time I Broke Production
- Hoang Nguu Son: Reach the Summit, Come Down, Keep Going
- Learning to Say No as a Developer
- When to Walk Away from a Project
- The Myth of the 10x Developer
- Why Side Projects Matter
- The Tech Transition
- Dealing with Legacy Code
- The Art of the Meaningful Commit Message
- Why I Love Writing Documentation
Ways of Working50
- Turning Review Evidence Into Team Memory
- Making Handoffs Honest About What Is Unknown
- Keeping Checklists Close to the Work
- Writing Status Updates People Can Act On
- Closing the Loop Before Starting the Next One
- Keeping Meeting Notes Close to Decisions
- Writing Next Steps That Actually Help
- Making Handoffs Easier to Receive
- Turning Unclear Work Into Shared Notes
- The Calm Way to Handle Scope Changes
- Managing Dependencies Without Blame
- Decision Logs for Busy Teams
- When the Roadmap Meets Real Capacity
- Cross-Functional Teams
- OKRs for Engineering Teams
- Trunk-Based Development
- TDD: Is It Worth the Time?
- Retrospectives That Actually Cause Change
- Writing Good Acceptance Criteria
- Kanban vs. Scrum: Which Fits Better?
- The Daily Standup That Changes Decisions
- Lean Business Analysis: Start from Value, Not Requirements
- Lean BA Planning: Stakeholders, Elicitation, and the Questions Behind Requirements
- Requirements Modeling: How BA Turns Messy Conversations into Shared Pictures
- Requirements Quality, Traceability, and Solution Evaluation: Keep the Promise After Sign-off
- Data: Data Is a Windshield for Operators
- Data: A Scorecard Is a One-Page Early Warning System
- Data: Everyone Has a Number Is Not Surveillance
- Data: Revenue Is Not Cash, and Profit Is Not Breathing Room
- Software Measurement and Estimation: Fewer Gut Feelings, Better Engineering Decisions
- Agile Estimating and Planning: Estimates Are Conversations, Not Promises
- Agile Release Planning: Plan with Value, Risk, and Real Feedback
- Agile is Dead, Long Live Agile
- The Design of Everyday Things: Make the Interface Explain Itself
- The Design of Everyday Things: Human Error Is Often System Design
- How Software Teams Really Work: Big Corp vs Startup vs Outsourcing
- Working in a Big Corp: Alignment, Process, and Getting Things Done at Scale
- Working in a Startup: Speed, Ambiguity, and Wearing Many Hats
- Working in Outsourcing & Software Services: Clients, Scope, and Delivery on Contract
- TDD, BDD, DDD, and the Rest of the "-Driven Development" Family, Explained for Engineers
- Agile & Scrum in Practice: How Teams Really Run It vs. How It's Meant to Work
- What Is a Pre-Mortem? Seeing Failure Early to Build Better Systems and Careers
- The Daily Standup: Status Report or Strategy?
- The Definition of Done vs. Ready
- Pair Programming: Love It or Hate It?
- Feature Flags for Safer Deployments
- Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery
- Shift-Left Security
- Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Traps
Notes
135 notes, grouped by topic.
Home Buying12
- Borrowing for a Home: Using Leverage with Clear Eyes
- Valuation and Negotiation When Buying a Home: Pay with Evidence, Not Emotion
- Location and Planning When Buying a Home: The Hardest Thing to Fix Later
- The Home Buying Process from A to Z: A Slow Map for First-Time Buyers
- Apartment, Landed House, or Project Home: Choose by the Way You Live
- Reading House Plans and Evaluating Build Quality: Seeing What Photos Do Not Show
- The Psychology of Buying a Home: Keeping Distance from Fast-Closing Pressure
- The Full Cost of Buying a Home: Seeing the Whole Picture Before Paying
- Risk Scenarios When Buying a Home: Loans, Deposits, and Disputes
- Real Estate Legal Checks: What to Review Before Paying
- Feng Shui When Buying a Home: Reading Light, Air, and Daily Habits
- What to Think About When You First Consider Buying a Home
Personal Finance & Saving11
- Budgeting and Cash Flow: A Gentle Map for Every Dollar You Earn
- Emergency Funds from A to Z: A Buffer for Unplanned Shocks
- Getting Out of Debt Wisely: Step by Step Through High-Interest Debt
- Investing for Beginners: Starting from a Stable Foundation
- Inflation and Purchasing Power: Why Money Needs Protection Over Time
- The Right Insurance: Buying Protection, Not Anxiety
- Avoiding Investment Scams: Recognizing Risk Before Sending Money
- Personal Finance by Age: What to Prioritize in Your 20s, 30s, and 40s
- Money in the Family: Talking About Finance Calmly
- Financial Prosperity: A Path for Money to Slowly Work for You
- Keeping Money in Your Pocket: Protecting the Value You Create
Career & Growth19
- Beneath a Photo Caption: BonBon, a $500K Round, and What a Co-founder Learns
- Trust Is Earned, Not Staged
- Before Working Harder, Check Whether the Direction Can Grow
- When Someone Else Succeeds, Do Not Let Your Own World Become Smaller
- Tang Sanzang Holds the Vision: A Leader Does Not Need to Do Everything, but Must Keep the Direction
- Sun Wukong at Work: 10x Talent Needs Room to Move and Clear Boundaries
- Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, and the White Dragon Horse: Quiet Roles That Keep a Team Moving
- Journey to the West as a Project Team: Every Hard Stretch Teaches Coordination
- Liu Bei and People-Centered Leadership at Work: Trust Must Become Behavior, Not Just Warm Words
- Cao Cao and Rule-Based Management at Work: Good Systems Help Teams Stop Managing by Emotion
- Between Liu Bei and Cao Cao: Work Needs Humanity, but It Also Needs Clear Rules
- In Front of People Who Can Lift You, Be Honest
- Echology Check: Testing an Idea Before It Distorts the Ecosystem
- Employee Happiness Often Starts with Meaningful Results
- Respecting Others: Looking Back at Myself Before Judging
- Receive, Hold, Break: Learning Without Getting Trapped by What I Know
- Living Many Roles and the Cost of Whole-Life Change
- Work With Care: Becoming Worth Trust Before Asking for Bigger Roles
- Owning Your Career: Turning Work into a Long-Term Platform
Book Notes19
- The Art of Thinking in Systems: Do Not Fix the Symptom and Call It a Solution
- The 7 Habits: Personal Effectiveness Begins With Keeping Promises to Yourself
- Atomic Habits: Big Change Often Begins With a Very Small System
- How to Win Friends and Influence People: Good Communication Begins When We Stop Making Ourselves the Center
- The World Is Flat: A Flatter World Is Not Automatically an Easier One
- The 360° Leader: Leadership Starts With Influence, Not a Title
- The 360° Leader: Leading Up Is Not Managing Your Boss
- The 360° Leader: Leading Across Means Helping Peers Win
- The 360° Leader: Leading Down Means Growing People
- The Visual MBA: Reading Business as a System That Has to Run
- Thinking, Fast and Slow: Catching My Mind Moving Too Quickly
- Game Theory: Wise Cooperation Is Not Giving Away the Win
- The Alchemist: The Long Road Back to What Was Already Yours
- Criminal Psychology: Learning to Read the Smallest Clues Carefully
- Think and Grow Rich: Desire Is Only Useful When It Becomes a Written Plan
- The 48 Laws of Power: Reading Power Without Becoming Cold
- David Eagleman on the Adaptive Brain: The Mind Learns Through Signals
- How to Change by Katy Milkman: Durable Change Starts in Small Places
- Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz: Relationships Are Built Before You Need Them
Perspectives & Reflections33
- Wisdom Needs Character So It Does Not Become a Sharp Knife
- Clarity Is a Form of Strength
- The Highest Strategy Is Not Winning the Battle, but Understanding People
- Lines Collected Along the Way: A Second Brain for Reminding Myself
- Seeing Human Nature More Clearly in Friendships
- The Pause Between Feeling and Response: Where Better Choices Begin
- The Foundation Comes First: Visible Progress Is Built Before Anyone Notices
- Two Ways of Thinking: How Induction and Deduction Shape Work and Relationships
- Fifteen Quiet Rules for Moving Through Work and Life
- Seven Quiet Principles for Doing Meaningful Work
- Working Calmly With People You Find Difficult
- Forgiveness Is for You: Setting Down a Weight You No Longer Need to Carry
- Your Salary Is Seed Capital, Not the Finish Line
- You Are Not a Machine: Why Rest Is Part of Doing Good Work
- Things Experience Slowly Teaches You
- The Approval Loop Has No Finish Line: Five Quiet Ways to Come Back to Yourself
- The Person Who Does Not Need to Prove It: Quiet Strength Without Performance
- Steady Presence: The Quiet Authority of People Who Hold Balance
- How People Actually Work: Fifteen Quiet Notes About the Human Mind
- Choice and Circumstance: Living Well Inside What You Cannot Fully Control
- The Old Man Who Lost His Horse: Hold the Verdict, Keep the Present
- Complexity Is Inevitable, Simplicity Is Sustainable: Lessons from Systems and Life
- Same Facts, Different Story: Position and Language Change the Experience
- From Idea to Follow-Through: The Quiet Practice of Not Stopping
- The Quiet Art of Letting Go: Seven Shifts of a Maturing Mind
- What C-Level Leaders Learn Before the Chair: Five Practical Roads in Big Corp
- The Quiet Strength of People Who Walk Alone
- The Meaning of a Life Is in the Living: A Gentle Case Against Waiting for Later
- Know the Map: Why Understanding Your Career Path Is an Engineer’s Quiet Advantage
- Deciding to Marry: 24 Conversations Before You Share a Home
- A Groom’s Practical Guide to Wedding Preparation: Stages and Budget in Vietnam
- Know Your Rights at Work: Quitting, Switching Jobs, Insurance and Tax in Vietnam
- The Monkey, the Bananas, and the Eight-Hour Question
Thought Garden40
- When Information Consumption Replaces Action
- Why Work Messages Can Feel Sharper Than Intended
- A Reading System
- Anchoring on Tool Capability Limits the Mind
- Be Mindful of What You Put Into Your Bucket
- Does Code Still Run on People?
- The Completeness Learning Bias
- The Different Purposes of Writing
- Feel the Sensation
- Healthy Disagreement
- How I Write Notes
- The Human Advantage: Brain Elasticity vs. Frozen Weights
- Indecisiveness
- What I Would Tell My 20-Year-Old Self
- Life Running on a Digital Engine
- Modal Thinking: Separate Deciding From Doing
- Play the Game
- The Programmable Self
- Programming Abstractions Are Bets
- Programming Beacons
- The Purpose of Highlights
- Reading Is Catching Balls
- Are There Recognizable Patterns of Valuable Thoughts?
- Sense
- Software Engineering Fatigue
- Start New Behaviors in Boring, Easy Mode
- The Cost of Delayed Action
- The Heuristics for 'What To Do Now'
- The Thinking and Doing Rhythm
- When Thinking Becomes the Excuse
- Trust
- A Rich, Consistent Vocabulary Is the Best API for Your Second Brain
- What If I Founded a Startup
- Write to Attend
- Write to Understand and to Transfer
- AI Reduces the Information Advantage
- Why Taking Notes?
- Perfect-Tools Syndrome
- Articulation Skill
- The Physics Laws of Life
Cars & Major Purchases1
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