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

6 articles from November 2024 · show all

Why even care about code structure

As long as it works, right?

Finding modules in a big ball of mud

Pulling modules out of a big ball of mud is like grabbing a slice of cheesy pizza. It's kinda separate but also not really.

Why you need observability more than tests

Here's a short and sweet story about a Friday deploy. I love Friday deploys.

The swarm doc

Here's a doc I like to use to structure the pre-work design chat that makes later code review a breeze.

Big Ball of Mud – the world's most popular software architecture

Forget Gang of Four, here are the 7 architectural patterns real programmers use:

Why software only moves forward

At scale there are no rollbacks and no cut-overs. Your software only moves forward.