Articles
Software engineering lessons from production, raw and honest from the heart — almost 20 years of them. Jump to a year in the sidebar, or browse categories.
January 2026
How you migrate is everything
Your code becomes legacy software when it works. You build something to solve a problem, then the problem changes. Or best practices evolve. Or you hire team members with more experience. Or the world changes. Or you have more people touching the same code and your beautiful architectural vision didn't translate.
The future of software engineering is SRE
When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
A tough job market is the best time to start something
Here's how to navigate a tough job market from someone dumb enough to have done it before. Me.
Place good startup bets
You can't win every bet. Your goal is to be a little more right than wrong and keep playing
Small projects, clear scope
Minutes of planning save you days of programming. It is shocking how little planning it takes to make a big difference.
A better way to end-to-end test your webapp
End-to-end tests are the best way to test your webapp, but they're flaky and annoying to write. I'm trying a new agentic approach that fixes the issue.
2025 Year in Review
I called it a year in review but it's so much more.
December 2025
Are you playing games you want to win?
As we enter the funny week-without-time between Christmas and New Year, it's a great time to reflect. Here's a framework I like to use.
How good engineering unlocks fast scaling
You're building systems and tools to help companies grow without drowning in work. This fuels your equity, career capital, and reputation.
Scaling Fast – my new book on software engineering through the hockeystick
After almost 3 years of writing, research, and editing Scaling Fast is now available in paperback and ebook wherever books are sold 🥳
November 2025
What makes your resume stand out
What did you do, for whom, did it work
How to lead a project
you were asked to lead or own a project. Now what? Here are a few practical steps to help you succeed.
*People* detangle a ball of mud
Ball of mud is the world's most popular software architecture. The one we all use at work. But it sucks to work with. So what do you do?
AI fills my day with busywork
Remember when AI was gonna take our jobs? I've never felt busier. The more I get done, the more there is to do.
The unreasonable effectiveness of stack ranking
Stakeholders are silly people. Everything feels important and urgent. Stack ranking helps
October 2025
Chesterton's true lesson
Too many engineers cry chestertons fence and never check why the code exists
The job behind the job [of a high level IC]
Advancing big goals while you stay on top of operational day-to-day fires _is the job_. This is hard. Here are a few tips I've found helpful.
Make sure it works first
Explore the importance of functionality over elegance in Swizec's latest piece. Learn from his experience of tripling an engineering team's size within a year.
Feedback is a strange thing
Performance oscillates around your mean. Your average is what matters.
React, HTMX, and TanStack/Start
More and more UI frameworks are ditching JSON as the transfer protocol and going back to server-rendered markup injected into your app
The grind won't get you there
Don't grind on something the company doesn't value. Hard work is not rewarded. **_Outcomes_** are rewarded.
September 2025
Most history is fake myth building
Regimes come and go but the people stay. Observations from living through a socialism->capitalism transition
You may be looking for a useSyncExternalStore
When you see a `useEffect` that updates a `useState` and returns a value, you might be looking for a `useSyncExternalStore`. This is my current vendetta.
How to be witty and off-the-cuff as a slow deep thinker
Deep thinking is the super power of wit
Should you join an AI startup right now?
Beyond income there's 2 reasons to take any specific job: Invest in yourself or invest in the company. Both is best.
Leadership lessons from growing 3x in 1 year
So this talk is my attempt to step back and write down some of the things I've learned. Hope you find something to apply in your team.
August 2025
Pair programming
Great for learning those little tricks of the trade you forgot you even learned
Yes it's like spinning plates
In a fast-growing company software engineering feels like spinning plates. Nothing ever stays fixed.
HTMX – Server Components without React
Let's be honest: Half the APIs you write are for a specific purpose in a specific component on a specific page. Re-usable in theory but you've never tried. That's where Server Components come in ... but what if your server isn't JavaScript?
Quick tips for distributed event-based systems
Hidden lessons painfully learned over the years.