Field notes
Blog
Written by the engineers doing the work. Opinionated, occasionally wrong, always specific.
Engineering
The strangler fig pattern, in practice
Incremental migration sounds obvious until you have to route live traffic. Here is what it actually takes.
Data & AI
You cannot ship an LLM feature without an eval suite
Manual spot-checking does not scale past the demo. Offline evals are the difference between a prototype and a product.
Cloud & Reliability
SLOs that mean something to the business
Ninety-nine point nine of what, measured where? Most SLOs measure the wrong thing.
Design & Product
Design systems that survive the handover
Most design systems decay within a year. The ones that do not share three properties.
Engineering
Postgres is probably enough
Before adding a fourth datastore, check what Postgres already does.
Cloud & Reliability
Cloud cost is an architecture problem
Rightsizing gets you 20%. Architecture gets you the rest.
Design & Product
Accessibility is cheaper when you start early
Retrofitting WCAG compliance costs several times what building it in does.
Cloud & Reliability
Observability beyond dashboards
If you only know what you thought to graph, you do not have observability.
Data & AI
Retrieval quality beats model choice
Teams spend weeks comparing models and days on their retrieval pipeline. The ratio should be reversed.
Security
A secure SDLC that does not slow delivery
Security gates that add a week get routed around. Here is what works.
Data & AI
Why your data team spends its week firefighting
Untested transformations and undefined ownership produce a permanent incident queue.
Engineering
Choosing boring technology on purpose
Innovation tokens are finite. Spend them where they differentiate you.
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