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.
40 articles from 2026 · show all
February 2026
GeLLMan amnesia
AI will automate every job except the ones I'm deeply familiar with
The 3 curves that make a scalable business
You want users and revenue to grow exponentially. Bugs per day to grow linearly. Support work to grow logarithmically. Your goal is to make this happen.
In praise of the stacked pull request
How fast you do code review is how fast you do everything. Your PR queue is the leading indicator of team velocity. Stacked PRs can help.
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.