Tag: #engineering

← All posts

• Persuasive Writing — The Structure That Gets Design Docs and RFCs Approved

  For anyone writing design docs, RFCs, proposals, or incident follow-up recommendations. This post covers putting the decision you want at the very top instead of the order in which you solved the problem, why showing the

  2026-08-02 · 14 min read #career#writing#persuasion#design-doc#engineering

• A Practical Procedure for Moving a Codebase with AI — Stand Up the Judge First, and Measure Review Rate Instead of Lines

  This post distills the procedure common to the large-scale LLM migrations published in the first half of 2026 (535,000 lines of Zig to Rust, 165,000 lines of Python to TypeScript) into an executable order of operations.

  2026-07-31 · 13 min read #ai#migration#refactoring#testing#engineering

• The Economics of Refactoring: When Does It Pay Off — Calculating With Change Frequency

  The Economic Benefit of Refactoring, published on martinfowler.com on July 30, 2026, refactored a 17,000-line module in 15 steps and measured input tokens for the same repeated change request dropping from 159,564 to 27,

  2026-07-31 · 15 min read #refactoring#engineering#technical-debt#ai#metrics

• Code Review That Teaches, Code Review That Wounds — What Makes the Same Note Land Differently

  Code review does three jobs at once — finding defects, spreading knowledge, and sharing ownership of the code — and most teams do only the first and lose the other two. This post covers the Google approval bar, where a r

  2026-07-26 · 11 min read #career#code-review#engineering#feedback#teamwork

• How to Prepare for a System Design Interview — 45 Minutes Graded on How You Narrow Down, Not on the Answer

  A system design interview has no right answer, so what gets graded is not what you drew but how you narrowed it down. A time budget that splits 45 minutes into 5, 10, 15, 10 and 5, the latency ladder worth memorizing by

  2026-07-26 · 11 min read #career#interview#system-design#engineering#job-search

• Building Effective AI Agents: A Reference on the Five Workflow Patterns and Agents

  A practical reference distilled from Anthropic's engineering guide "Building Effective Agents." It covers the precise distinction between workflows and agents, the building block underneath everything — the augmented LLM

  2026-07-11 · 8 min read #ai#agents#llm#engineering#anthropic

• Debugging Like a Scientist: Hypothesis-Driven Debugging

  Instead of staring at code and changing things at random, debug like a scientist: form a hypothesis, make a prediction, and test it. Binary-search the problem space, build a minimal reproducible example, hunt the culprit

  2026-07-03 · 14 min read #debugging#engineering#productivity#fundamentals

• What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer?

  The role Palantir popularized and that AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have made hot again in their solutions orgs. A forward deployed engineer is embedded with the customer, blends software engineering, product,

  2026-07-02 · 7 min read #career#engineering#fde

• How to Read Code You Didn't Write

  Developers spend far more time reading code than writing it, yet nobody teaches code reading. Find the entry point, follow the data instead of every line, treat tests and types as documentation, draw call graphs with gre

  2026-07-01 · 11 min read #code-reading#engineering#onboarding#fundamentals

• Naming Things: The Hardest Easy Skill in Code

  The joke that "there are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things" is only half a joke. Why a good name reveals intent rather than implementation, how name length scales with scope,

  2026-06-30 · 8 min read #clean-code#engineering#fundamentals

• The FDE Playbook: Winning With Throwaway Prototypes

  How a forward deployed engineer flips the table by shipping a working demo on the customer real data in days. Deliberate, disposable tech debt; the spike that de-risks; when to hardcode; getting to the aha moment fast; m

  2026-06-30 · 8 min read #engineering#prototyping#fde

• Communication for Engineers: How to Get Technical Decisions Made

  Good ideas usually fail not because they are bad but because they are delivered badly. This post covers writing design docs and RFCs, leading with the problem instead of the solution, tailoring the message to executives

  2026-06-27 · 13 min read #career#communication#engineering

• Code Review as Communication: Feedback Without Friction

  Code review is a technical activity for catching defects, but it is also a conversation between two people. This post covers framing critique at the code rather than the person, using conventional comments to separate ni

  2026-06-26 · 14 min read #code-review#communication#engineering

• Technical Overreach and Scope — Lessons from Carmacks Retrospective ♪ Listenable

  Using John Carmacks publicly shared Quake retrospective as a starting point, we draw out the technical ambition and organizational challenges of early game development as general lessons. We cover the value of choosing s

  2026-06-25 · 25 min read #culture#engineering#scope#technical-debt#team

• The Joy of Understanding — Why Deep Understanding Still Matters in the LLM Era ♪ Listenable

  Search and LLMs give fast answers, but deep understanding gives control and ownership. We cover the value of seeing beneath abstractions, the stance of not being dragged by your tools, the difference understanding makes

  2026-06-25 · 24 min read #culture#learning#craftsmanship#understanding#engineering

• What Distributed Systems Taught Me About Relationships

  Retries with backoff, timeouts, heartbeats, consistency models, backpressure, graceful degradation, idempotency, the Two Generals Problem, and trust as a cache with a TTL. The same problems that make distributed systems

  2026-06-25 · 13 min read #engineering#relationships#fun#distributed-systems

• From Bespoke to Platform: Productizing FDE Work

  The feedback loop between the forward deployed engineer (FDE) and product. Spotting the same pattern across N customers, extracting a config and an abstraction, and using the rule of three to know when NOT to generalize.

  2026-06-24 · 8 min read #product#engineering#fde

• Never Lose Your Beginner's Mind — How to Resist the Lure of Comfort ♪ Listenable

  A beginner's mind is not a grand vow but something that dims a little every day. Here is how the lure of comfort and short-term sweetness become a boomerang, and the systems that keep you the kind of person who finishes

  2026-06-19 · 33 min read #beginners-mind#discipline#engineering#habits#culture

• Philosophy for Engineers — Applying Stoicism and Pragmatism to Your Work ♪ Listenable

  How to apply the Stoic dichotomy of control, the pragmatist test of what works, essentialism, and craftsmanship to an engineer everyday life. Not abstract sermonizing, but concrete use in code reviews, incidents, and car

  2026-06-16 · 22 min read #philosophy#stoicism#pragmatism#engineering#mindset

• SQLite Is Everywhere (and It's Amazing)

  The most-deployed database on Earth is not Oracle or Postgres — it is SQLite. It is in your phone, your browser, even on airplanes. A tour of its serverless single-file design, when it beats a client-server database, WAL

  2026-06-15 · 11 min read #databases#sqlite#engineering