Non-Functional Requirements and Modularity
When software engineers talk about requirements, we’re often talking past each other. Functional requirements are easy to write, decompose…
Maneesh Chaturvedi
What Abstractions Really Are
Software developers hear about abstractions all the time. They’re hailed as the answer to complexity, the foundation of clean architecture, and the secret to flexible systems. But what is an abstraction really? Is it just a way to hide details? Is it a simplification? A mental model? Something real,
Houston, We Have a Problem: A Fictional Postmortem of a Very Real Tech Culture
A novel about outages, war rooms, and the people who break — long before the systems do.
What’s the Real Cost of Building a Production-Grade System Using Only AI?
The dream of building software using only artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction. Tools like GPT-4, Claude, and open-source…
Are You Ready to Manage a Software Organization Run by Software?
Let’s flip the script.
Kill the Knobs, Keep the Meaning: Feature Flags Done Right
I’ve come across a recurring design challenge in software systems that relies heavily on feature flags: they often turn into configuration…
Design Discussions: Jira Migrations
I recently came across an interesting post on the Atlassian blog about “Scaling Jira Cloud migrations with external importers.” I like…
Career Craft: 10 Principles for Building a Resilient Career in 2025
Careers aren’t ladders anymore. They’re portfolios. They’re products. They’re stories we craft – not paths we follow.
What Really Makes Software Bloated? (Hint: It’s Not Just Size)
“Bloat isn’t when code is big. Bloat is when code makes easy things hard.”
Why Studying Design Patterns Won’t Make You a Better Developer
Ask any aspiring software developer how they plan to become better at software design, and chances are “learning design patterns” will be…
Layered Defenses and Latent Failures: Why Software Errors Happen
Software errors don’t spring forth from a single bug or an isolated lapse in concentration. They propagate — emerging from a cascade of…
The Lost Art of Questioning — And Why Software Professionals Must Reclaim It
“Questions organise our thinking around what we don’t know.”