Engineer by trade. Writer by habit.
The series finale: how SRE's management practices invented platform engineering a decade early. Training, interrupts, culture — and what the data says now.
Multi-part deep dives, if you want to go deep on one topic.
Standalone posts first, then the newest series parts — so a big series drop never buries the rest.
Architect vs. Gardener, PARA vs. evergreen notes — with a real Obsidian migration (487 links, 0 broken) showing why AI search favors one.
Karpathy's LLM talk, rebuilt with diagrams and primary sources — how models train, compress the internet, and become the kernel of a new OS.
AI doesn't let managers scale 5x with headcount — it shifts their time into coaching and judgment. Here's how AI-era performance reviews should work.
The 6–8 person team rule shaped modern engineering management. Here's why it's about to flip — and what AI agents mean for span of control and your role.
Most managers accidentally make their teams dependent on them. These 7 coaching questions break that cycle — with real workplace scenarios for each.
Claude Code isn't just AI autocomplete — it changes how you build software. Here's the mental model, strengths, pitfalls, and what you need to get productive.
The series finale: how SRE's management practices invented platform engineering a decade early. Training, interrupts, culture — and what the data says now.
Hermetic builds, canarying, the launch checklist's one brutal rule — and CrowdStrike 2024 as the lesson in skipping validation. Part 11.
Pipelines are distributed systems with a moiré problem; backups are a tax and restores are the product. Part 10 — with GitLab 2017 and Atlassian 2022.
See leader election, think distributed consensus — anything less is a ticking bomb. Part 9: quorums, split brains, CAP, and the double-launching cron.
How load balancing works, why 'queries per second' is a terrible metric, and the cascade loop that kills distributed systems. Part 8, with Fastly's 2021 outage.
ICS roles, the incident-state doc, the blameless postmortem, and the data layer that turns outages into improvement. Part 7, plus the incident.io ecosystem.
