Ship fast without breaking things

Every team slows down as it grows. More people, more code, more meetings, less shipping. It doesn't have to be that way.

These essays dig into velocity, teamwork, and taming complexity — the engineering side and the people side. They're the thinking behind Scaling Fast, my book on software engineering through hypergrowth.

Essays on shipping fast

4 articles from January 2026 · show all

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.

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.