Long-form, honest writing on system design, AI, cloud, and the craft of building software that lasts.
Dec 13, 2025
A practical, non-performative guide to running blameless postmortems that improve reliability: how to facilitate, what to document, and how to turn incidents into learning and follow-through.
Dec 12, 2025
A practical 2-hour checklist for early-stage SaaS teams to quickly understand their architecture, surface risks, and decide what to fix next before scaling further.
Dec 11, 2025
Internal platforms are good at adding features. The hard part is turning them off without breaking every team’s workflow. Here’s how to design deprecation so you can simplify safely.
Dec 10, 2025
AI can help your deployment pipeline see more and react faster – or quietly turn it into an opaque risk factory. Here’s where AI belongs in CI/CD, and where it really doesn’t.
Dec 9, 2025
Not all technical debt shows up in your latency graphs. Some of the most expensive debt is the kind that quietly drives away the people you most want to hire and keeps new joiners stuck for months.
Dec 8, 2025
Team Topologies is not just a way to categorise teams. It is a practical lens for deciding where product, platform and operational decisions should live so that systems can evolve safely and quickly.
Dec 7, 2025
Internal developer platforms can be powerful, but in the wrong context they quietly add overhead, fragility, and political risk. Here’s how to tell when an IDP is the wrong move and what to do instead.
Dec 6, 2025
Why adding AI to an existing system doesn’t just add features – it changes how and where the system can fail, and what architecture has to do about it.
Dec 5, 2025
Why architecture diagrams drift away from reality in most organisations, and how to make them a living source of truth instead of wall art.
Dec 4, 2025
How organisations end up with microservices on the diagram but monolithic decision-making in practice – and what to change in architecture and team design.
Dec 3, 2025
The one question to answer before you spin up a platform engineering team or buy an IDP, and how it shapes the architecture and scope of the platform.
Dec 2, 2025
How to add AI features to your product with clear boundaries, predictable delivery, and real user value – without drifting into open-ended research.
Dec 1, 2025
Why chasing deployment frequency as a target can backfire, and how to use it as a symptom of deeper architecture, pipeline, and team health instead.
Nov 30, 2025
Why modern architects create spaces for teams to make good decisions, instead of acting as design police on the critical path.
Nov 29, 2025
Why architecture diagrams inevitably reflect how your teams and responsibilities are structured – and how to use that fact instead of fighting it.
Nov 28, 2025
Why platform teams should be shaped by the cognitive load they remove from product teams, not by existing reporting lines or technology silos.
Nov 25, 2025
How to tell whether your internal developer platform is actually reducing cognitive load and lead time – or just adding another layer of control-plane complexity.
Nov 24, 2025
Why some AI-powered DevOps pipelines increase risk instead of reducing it – and how to design automation that actually makes delivery safer.
Nov 23, 2025
How to place AI in your architecture diagrams so that it reflects real responsibilities and risks – and where not to put it at all.
Nov 22, 2025
How system architecture changes when you design around small language models instead of defaulting to large LLMs – and when you need each in 2025.
Nov 21, 2025
How system design changes when autonomous AI agents, not humans, become your primary users—and what to change in architecture, safety, and observability.