Atomicity Beyond Transactions

A Compass for Modular Software Design

The API Design Manual

The API Design manual I wish someone else had written

Designing for Change: How to Anticipate the Future Without Guessing It

Software design is the art of managing change. But what kind of change should we anticipate, and how should that shape our designs?

What Happens If We All Stop Feeding the Machine?

How humans can reclaim their value in the age of AI by refusing to become just data.

Tidy First? by Kent Beck — Hits And Misses

I recently finished reading Tidy First? by Kent Beck, a short, thoughtful book that champions the habit of cleaning code as a deliberate…

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…

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…