Essays
Finished arguments. Long, opinionated, meant to change your mind.
Architecture Is a Story About Trust
Every boundary in a system is a statement about which team you trust to not break you.
Leaving the Big Company, Slowly
Notes on building something of your own without a dramatic exit, and why the slow version might be better.
Scale Is a Sequence, Not a Destination
Systems do not break at scale. They break in a predictable order, and knowing the order is most of the job.
The Agent-Shaped Codebase
Codebases are about to be read more often by agents than by people. That changes what "clean code" means.
The Review Is the Work
When generation is free, the scarce resource is judgement. That reframes what a senior engineer is for.
Watch read replicas stop helping
Replicas fix read saturation and nothing else. Here is the exact point where adding another one stops paying for itself.
What Agents Still Cannot Do
An honest list, kept up to date, of where the end-to-end agentic workflow still falls over.
How One Feature From a Failed Startup Can Become a Billion Dollar Idea
Failed products often contain one feature that was worth more than the whole company around it.
How buying an iPhone helped me to land my first job as a Developer?
No, not by writing an iOS application. A story about noticing what nobody else in the room noticed.