Ship fast without breaking things

How to be useful as a software architect

Software architects have a weird role: Think about the code _tomorrow_. Today's code is what it is, how do we make it good tomorrow? Without slowing down, losing business, or falling off a cliff.

The one thing every experienced engineer gets wrong

In the last few months every engineer I hired stumbled in exactly the same way: Project management. They learned quickly, but that first big project has become a rite of passage.

Theory of constraints, AI, and code review

Feedback from an expert is how you learn taste. Your code doesn't matter until it's shipped.

You get what you hire

Hiring engineers is like deciding what kind of system you'll have. This seems obvious but surprised me to see first-hand.

Relentlessly focus on the outcomes

AI makes it easy to focus inwards and feel impressed with all the churn and motion and output you're producing. But your users don't care.

Engineering levels aren't about skill anymore

Traditional engineering levels were about skill progression. I think this has changed. Everyone now is a mini staff engineer.

Just fix their PR

You know what's better than a code review comment? A fix.

The best engineers just get shit done, sometimes with AI

The best engineers I know never talk about their AI setup. The worst engineers I know only talk about their AI setup.

Taming chaos is a learnable skill

How you approach software engineering makes it harder or easier to handle interruptions and other chaos. Writing a behavioral interview made me realize this is a learnable skill!

Probably the realest thing I ever wrote

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.

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.