Two hundred pieces in
What writing in public taught me about engineering, what I was most wrong about, and why the archive is the point.
#opinion
36 pieces tagged opinion,
from January 3, 2025 to August 3, 2026.
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.
Vendor lock-in: an honest cost model
Portability is not free and neither is dependence. A framework for deciding how much abstraction to buy.
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.
What a staff engineer does all day
The role is genuinely ambiguous and that ambiguity is load-bearing. An attempt at a concrete description.
Rewrites: when they actually work
The received wisdom is never rewrite. The received wisdom is mostly right and has three real exceptions.
Edge computing, honestly
Running code close to users is a real win for a narrow set of workloads and a complication for everything else.
Platform teams that don't get resented
Internal platforms fail for predictable reasons. The successful ones share four properties.
Open source funding: five models, honestly compared
Donations, foundations, dual licensing, open core, and hosted service. Each works for a specific shape of project.
Hiring juniors in 2026
The entry-level pipeline is breaking in a way that will be expensive in five years. Some of the fixes are cheap.
The three kinds of technical debt
Deliberate, accidental, and structural. They need completely different responses and everyone calls them the same thing.
You still do not need Kubernetes
It's excellent software solving a real problem that most teams do not have. The honest threshold, and what to do below it.
everything else tagged #opinion 24
- The database you should have chosenessay
- The state of self-hostingessay
- The cost of a meeting, in engineering termsessay
- The engineer's guide to saying noessay
- Documentation is a product and you should staff it like oneessay
- Every company is briefly a model companyessay
- What happened to microservicesessay
- Go and the case for boringessay
- Rust's eleventh year and the shape of a finished languagenews
- Verification is the whole job nowessay
- Five things that will actually change in 2026essay
- What I got wrong in 2025essay
- Advent of Code and what a puzzle is foressay
- The technical interview is measuring the wrong thing, againessay
- Estimation is a communication problemessay
- The pull request is the wrong unit of reviewessay
- The monorepo question has a boring answeressay
- Rate limits are a product decision, not an infrastructure oneessay
- Stack Overflow's traffic fell off a cliff and it is not coming backessay
- Shopify's memo and the new hiring questionessay
- Vibe coding is real, and it is not what you thinkessay
- In defense of the boring deployessay
- Your CI is the slowest developer on the teamessay
- The year the model comes to the laptopessay