From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
AI can produce code quickly, but engineers still own the understanding, judgment, and system-level decisions that make software dependable.
AI engineeringSoftware designTechnical leadership
A field guide for growing engineers
Engineering, distilled.
Short, faithful explanations of enduring ideas—selected for engineers learning to build, reason, and lead in the AI era.
27 reads
A Philosophy of Software Design
Good design continuously reduces the amount of system knowledge a developer must hold in mind to make a safe change.
Software designTechnical leadership
Simple Made Easy
Choose structures that keep concerns separate, even when a more familiar tool feels easier in the moment.
Software designTechnical leadership
How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters
A good API makes the common path obvious, mistakes difficult, and future evolution possible without exposing implementation decisions.
API designSoftware design
Unit Testing Best Practices
Valuable tests protect important behavior while remaining stable when implementation details change.
TestingSoftware design
Debugging: 9 Indispensable Rules
Debugging becomes systematic when you replace guesses with reproducible evidence and narrow the search space one fact at a time.
DebuggingSoftware design
Performance Analysis: The USE Method
For every system resource, check utilization, saturation, and errors before chasing more elaborate performance theories.
PerformanceDebuggingReliability
Stability Patterns and Antipatterns
Design every integration with the assumption that dependencies will slow down, fail, and recover imperfectly.
ReliabilityDistributed systemsSoftware design
Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
The most valuable software models emerge through sustained collaboration with domain experts and remain useful only inside explicit boundaries.
Domain designSoftware designTechnical leadership
Full Cycle Developers @ Netflix
Teams improve systems faster when the people who build a service also receive its operational feedback and have the tools to act on it.
Engineering ownershipTechnical leadershipReliability
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Teams ship more predictably when leaders bound the problem before committing and let builders vary scope inside a fixed appetite.
Project deliveryProduct managementTechnical leadership
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
Project process is an enabler, not the goal; capable teams execute through autonomy, clear ownership, direct communication, and strong tooling.
Project deliveryEngineering ownershipTechnical leadership
Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell
Product ownership turns a vision into a continuously reprioritized flow of small outcomes while protecting the team from excess work in progress.
Product managementProject delivery
Technical Leadership and Glue Work
Glue work can make a team succeed while quietly stalling the career of the person doing it unless the work is allocated, framed, and rewarded deliberately.
Career developmentTechnical leadershipEngineering ownership
Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
The Staff path is not simply more difficult coding; it is organizational leadership exercised through technical judgment, influence, and leverage.
Career developmentTechnical leadership
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Management is a parallel profession, not a promotion, and moving between IC and management roles can deliberately build stronger technical leaders.
Career developmentTechnical leadership
On Being a Senior Engineer
Seniority is engineering maturity: sound judgment under uncertainty, responsibility for outcomes, and the ability to make everyone around you more capable.
Career developmentTechnical leadershipEngineering ownership
The Definition of a Tech Lead
A Tech Lead is accountable for a team’s technical direction and quality—not simply the strongest coder, a project coordinator, or a junior Engineering Manager.
Technical leadershipCareer developmentEngineering ownershipProject delivery
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
A meeting that looks like one hour on a manager’s calendar can destroy half a day of a maker’s productive work.
Project deliveryTechnical leadershipCareer development
Hints for Computer System Design
System design is the discipline of choosing which goals matter most and combining techniques that satisfy them without pretending every desirable property can be maximized.
Software designDistributed systemsReliability
What Breaks Our Systems: A Taxonomy of Black Swans
Catastrophic outages are hard to predict in detail but often share recurring shapes that can be tested, monitored, and contained in advance.
ReliabilityDistributed systemsEngineering ownership
The Power of Abstraction
Encapsulation makes local reasoning possible by forcing every use of a data abstraction through operations that preserve its meaning.
Software designAPI design
Why Good Software Goes Bad
Software quality follows the process that creates it, and a process can improve only when the organization observes reality and changes its behavior.
Project deliveryTechnical leadershipReliability
Level Up: Choosing the Technical Leadership Path
Technical leadership aligns how a group applies technology, and engineers can begin practicing it by owning one neglected source of misalignment before receiving the title.
Technical leadershipCareer developmentEngineering ownership
The Right Amount of Spec for Agentic Development
Agentic development needs enough specification to make correctness testable, but not so much stale prose that agents must reconcile competing sources of truth.
AI engineeringSoftware designTesting
Career Advice for Programmers
Manage your career around the options and life you want, then make your experience visible enough that other people can connect it to opportunities.
Career developmentTechnical leadership
Mentoring That Actually Changes Careers
Useful mentoring contributes lived experience to the mentee’s real question while preserving their agency and making overlooked capability visible.
Career developmentTechnical leadership