Deleting code is the highest-value work nobody schedules
Every line you remove is one that cannot break, cannot be misread, and does not need to be maintained.
#engineering
60 pieces tagged engineering,
from February 4, 2025 to July 29, 2026.
The performance budget
A number, agreed in advance, that fails the build. The only mechanism that has ever kept a system fast.
What I look for in a codebase in the first hour
A checklist for assessing an unfamiliar codebase quickly — for a job, a due diligence, or a project you inherited.
Property-based testing deserves its moment
State an invariant, let the machine find the counterexample. A twenty-year-old technique that fits this moment exactly.
Vendor lock-in: an honest cost model
Portability is not free and neither is dependence. A framework for deciding how much abstraction to buy.
Secrets management, practically
Not a survey of vaults. The specific practices that actually reduce risk, in order of what to do first.
Code review comments that change things
Most review comments are noise or nitpicks. A small taxonomy of the ones that are worth writing.
Backpressure is the concept your system is missing
When a fast producer meets a slow consumer, something has to give. Deciding what, in advance, is the whole discipline.
Cross-platform is a promise you make to your budget
Write once, run anywhere, debug everywhere. The honest accounting of what each approach actually costs.
Retries: a complete guide to not making it worse
The most common way a small incident becomes a large one is a retry policy written without thinking about aggregate behavior.
Configuration is the most under-designed part of your system
It has no type system, no tests, no review, and it causes a disproportionate share of outages.
Randomness, and the bugs you cannot reproduce
The bug that happens once a week and never in staging. A systematic approach to the class of problem everyone handles badly.
everything else tagged #engineering 48
- Licenses: a practical guide for people who shipessay
- Distributed tracing that people actually useessay
- Static analysis is finally worth the false positivesessay
- Time zones, and why your calendar code is wrongessay
- Rewrites: when they actually workessay
- What a great bug report containsessay
- Model evaluation for people who shipessay
- Idempotency is the only distributed systems concept you needessay
- Compression is underratedessay
- The queue is the architectureessay
- Run the incident before the incidentessay
- Error messages are a user interfaceessay
- Naming things: the actual rulesessay
- Search is hard and you should probably not build itessay
- Migrations that don't wake anyone upessay
- The three kinds of technical debtessay
- The retrieval question, revisitedessay
- The API versioning decisionessay
- Observability costs more than the thing it observesessay
- Infrastructure as code, ten years of lessonsessay
- Rate limiting: the four algorithms and when each is wrongessay
- Agent fleets in production: a field reportreview
- Why your build is slowessay
- Design docs people actually readessay
- Schema design is the only design that lastsessay
- GDC and the engineering nobody outside games learns fromessay
- Feature flags and the state space nobody testsessay
- Every company is briefly a model companyessay
- Type systems and the cost of being rightessay
- What happened to microservicesessay
- Go and the case for boringessay
- The dependency budgetessay
- How to read a benchmarkessay
- Your monitoring is measuring the wrong ninesessay
- Local-first is finally practicalessay
- Reading code is a skill and nobody teaches itessay
- Verification is the whole job nowessay
- Five things that will actually change in 2026essay
- SQLite in production, seriouslyessay
- The pull request is the wrong unit of reviewessay
- The monorepo question has a boring answeressay
- Caching is the only optimization that reliably worksessay
- Write the README firstessay
- Your logs are a product and you are shipping a bad oneessay
- The test suite is a design documentessay
- The eight git commands worth actually learningessay
- You did not audit that dependency and neither did Iessay
- Your CI is the slowest developer on the teamessay