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.
Engineering, distilled.
Short, faithful explanations of enduring ideas—selected for engineers learning to build, reason, and lead in the AI era.
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.
Simple Made Easy
Choose structures that keep concerns separate, even when a more familiar tool feels easier in the moment.
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.
Unit Testing Best Practices
Valuable tests protect important behavior while remaining stable when implementation details change.
Debugging: 9 Indispensable Rules
Debugging becomes systematic when you replace guesses with reproducible evidence and narrow the search space one fact at a time.
Performance Analysis: The USE Method
For every system resource, check utilization, saturation, and errors before chasing more elaborate performance theories.
Stability Patterns and Antipatterns
Design every integration with the assumption that dependencies will slow down, fail, and recover imperfectly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Power of Abstraction
Encapsulation makes local reasoning possible by forcing every use of a data abstraction through operations that preserve its meaning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leadership That Gets Results
Effective leadership is not a fixed personality style but a repertoire of behaviors chosen to create the climate a team needs now.
The Multiplier Effect: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
A leader creates more capacity by using their intelligence to evoke judgment in others—not by remaining the person who supplies every answer and rescue.
The Constant Life of a Tech Lead
A tech lead's scarce resource is attention: they must keep technical, people, and system concerns moving without letting urgent execution erase durable learning.
Levelling Up as a Lead Developer
Becoming a lead is an identity shift from being valued for personal problem solving to increasing the effectiveness and judgment of the whole team.