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Engineering

73 entries tagged “Engineering”

    AI-Native Architecture Patterns 2026: Production Guide · 7 min Production AI architecture patterns for gateways, retrieval, evaluation, fallbacks, cost control, and ownership. architecture ai engineering Building Reliable AI Agents in Go · 6 min Reliable agents are engineered, not prompted: bounded tools, validation at every step, explicit recovery paths. Here's how I build them in Go. agents reliability ai AI Technical Debt Is Eating Your Team Alive (And You Can't Even See It) · 4 min AI debt hides in prompts nobody owns, evals nobody runs, and data pipelines nobody watches. By the time you notice, every change feels dangerous. technical-debt ai engineering AI Doesn't Make Your Team Faster. Shared Infrastructure Does. · 3 min Individual AI speedups are a distraction. The real gains come from treating AI as team infrastructure -- embedded in docs, decisions, and onboarding. productivity ai teams AI Pair Programming: It's a Junior Dev, Not a Wizard · 4 min Treat AI coding assistants like a fast, literal junior dev: tight constraints, critical review, and no expectations of architectural insight. ai engineering productivity AI Docs That Don't Lie to Your Users · 4 min Most AI documentation systems retrieve the wrong version, hallucinate details, and never admit uncertainty. Here's how to build one that actually helps. engineering ai llm Your AI System Looks Healthy. It Is Not. · 4 min Traditional monitoring will tell you your AI service is up. It won't tell you it's returning confident garbage. Here's what observability actually looks like for AI. observability ai production AI Code Review Is Mostly Noise · 4 min I've been running AI code review on real PRs for months. It catches some real bugs. It also generates a staggering amount of useless commentary. engineering ai development Let AI Write Your First Draft, Not Your Docs · 3 min AI is a decent drafting assistant for technical docs. It's a terrible replacement for ownership. engineering ai developer-experience AI-Assisted Code Migration: What Actually Works · 4 min I used LLMs to help migrate a 200K-line Go codebase. The mechanical parts went fast. Everything else was still hard. ai technical-debt go Architecting AI-Native Applications (Without the Delusion) · 7 min AI-native apps are fundamentally different from a model bolted onto a CRUD app. How I structure them -- with code, layers, and hard-won opinions. architecture ai engineering Stop Paying OpenAI to Test Your Prompts · 4 min Local LLMs are finally good enough for development. Use them for iteration, keep the API bills for production. llm engineering go Responsible AI Is Just Risk Management. Treat It That Way. · 3 min Responsible AI is not an ethics committee. It is operational risk management, and teams that treat it otherwise are building liabilities. ai security governance AI Technical Debt Is Eating Your Codebase (You Just Cannot See It Yet) · 4 min AI features create a new species of technical debt that hides in prompts, data pipelines, and model versions. By the time you notice it, the cleanup bill is brutal. ai technical-debt engineering Your LLM Bill Is Your Own Fault · 4 min Everyone's complaining about LLM costs. Almost nobody has done the basics: caching, model routing, or even measuring what they're spending per feature. ai cost llm Building Semantic Search in Go: From Embeddings to Production · 7 min A hands-on walkthrough of building semantic search with Go, OpenAI embeddings, and pgvector -- chunking, hybrid retrieval, and the gotchas I hit. ai llm go AI Code Review: What It Actually Catches (And What It Misses) · 4 min After three months of using AI-assisted code review across multiple projects, here's what actually works and what's just noise. ai engineering developer-experience AI Safety Is Just Security Engineering With Extra Steps · 4 min AI safety is not a philosophy problem for engineers. It is reliability, security, and accountability applied to a new kind of system. ai governance security LLM Integration Patterns That Actually Survive Production · 6 min Practical patterns for integrating LLMs into real applications -- prompt management, structured outputs, caching, fallbacks, and tool use -- with Go examples. ai llm go AI in Production Is Just Engineering. Treat It That Way. · 4 min ChatGPT changed expectations overnight, but shipping AI features that actually work is an engineering problem, not a model problem. ai production engineering My Honest Take on GitHub Copilot After Six Months · 5 min Six months with Copilot in real projects. What it actually helps with, where it quietly makes things worse, and why the productivity claims are overblown. ai developer-experience productivity Your Engineering Docs Are Probably Useless · 4 min Most engineering documentation is ignored for predictable reasons. Here is how to write docs that people actually read. engineering developer-experience teams TypeScript: A Go Developer's Honest Take · 4 min TypeScript is the best thing to happen to JavaScript. That bar is lower than people think. Here's what actually matters for large codebases. engineering architecture go Log4j Is on Fire. Here's What to Do Right Now. · 5 min CVE-2021-44228 is the worst vulnerability I have seen in a decade. If you run Java anywhere, stop reading the news and start inventorying. security engineering incident-management Hybrid Work Is Harder Than Full Remote · 5 min Everyone thinks hybrid is the compromise between remote and office. It is actually harder to get right than either extreme. remote-work teams leadership Rust for Cloud Services: A Go Developer's Honest Take · 4 min I write Go for a living. Rust is not replacing it. But I have to be honest about where Rust wins. engineering go cloud eBPF Is Interesting. I Am Not Sold Yet. · 3 min eBPF promises kernel-level observability without the pain of kernel modules. The tech is real. The hype-to-adoption ratio concerns me. observability engineering performance What Actually Works for Distributed Teams (Six Months In) · 5 min After running a remote-first company for years and watching everyone else scramble through COVID, here's what I've learned actually works -- and what doesn't. remote-work teams engineering Most Developer Productivity Metrics Are Management Theater · 4 min Lines of code, velocity charts, commit counts — most developer productivity metrics are garbage. DORA metrics are the only ones worth your time. productivity metrics engineering What I Actually Changed About Engineering Interviews Over Zoom · 4 min Whiteboard coding over Zoom is broken. Here's what I do instead when hiring engineers virtually. hiring remote-work engineering State Of Linux Usability 2020 · 12 min We've carried out a series of daily tasks on TOP 20 Linux distros as well as Windows and macOS to test whether Linux has a chance to compete in daily use space. engineering development reflection Your Team Isn't Remote. It's Just on Zoom. · 3 min Most teams claiming to work remotely are just recreating the office over video calls. Async communication is the actual unlock, and almost nobody is doing it right. remote-work architecture leadership Your Business Continuity Plan Is Corporate Theater · 6 min Most BCP documents are shelf-ware written by consultants. Here's what actually keeps engineering teams running when everything breaks. reliability engineering remote-work Your Team Just Went Remote. Here's What to Do Right Now. · 3 min COVID forced your engineering team remote overnight. Here's the no-fluff version of what actually matters in the first two weeks. remote-work engineering teams Your Onboarding Is Broken and Everyone Knows It · 6 min Most engineering onboarding is a polite abandonment ritual. What I've learned across three startups about getting new engineers shipping fast. hiring engineering teams Data Mesh Is an Org Chart Fix, Not a Tech One · 3 min Most data problems are ownership problems. Data mesh gets that right. But adopting it as an architecture diagram exercise misses the point entirely. data architecture engineering Your Monolith Is Probably Fine · 5 min Most teams shouldn't be migrating to microservices. Here's how to tell if you actually should, and how to do it without wrecking your delivery for eighteen months. microservices architecture go Your Staging Environment Is Lying to You · 5 min Staging never catches the real bugs. Here's how I learned to test in production without burning everything down. testing production ci-cd Your SLOs Are Probably Useless (Here's How to Fix Them) · 6 min Most SLOs are dashboards nobody acts on. Pick indicators that reflect real users, set targets from data, and make error budgets change how your team ships. reliability observability engineering Design for Failure or It Will Design Your Weekend · 3 min Failure is not an edge case but the default state you hold off with good engineering. Hard-won rules for systems that bend instead of shatter. reliability architecture distributed-systems Your Internal Platform Is Probably a Liability · 3 min Most internal developer platforms fail because nobody treated them like a product. Lessons from building (and scrapping) platform tooling at three startups. platform-engineering devops developer-experience Your API Is a Contract You Can't Take Back · 4 min Hard-won lessons on designing HTTP APIs that survive real integrations, drawn from building fintech and mobility platforms. api engineering backend Migrating to TypeScript Without Losing Your Mind · 5 min How to introduce TypeScript to a real JavaScript codebase incrementally, without halting product work or annoying your entire team. engineering databases development How We Track and Prioritize Tech Debt at a Fintech Startup · 5 min A framework for cataloging technical debt, scoring it by impact and risk, and scheduling paydown without stalling feature delivery. technical-debt engineering leadership What I Learned Scaling an Engineering Team · 6 min Lessons from growing an engineering org at the fintech startup -- what breaks, what works, and why clarity beats process every time. engineering leadership teams What I Learned About Code Reviews the Hard Way · 4 min Most code reviews are theater. Here's how we fixed ours at the fintech startup and what actually made a difference. engineering teams Making Go Services Fast: What Actually Matters · 7 min Practical patterns for squeezing performance out of Go services — profiling, allocation control, bounded concurrency, and HTTP/DB tuning from real production work. go performance backend Stop Wasting Everyone's Time in Technical Interviews · 6 min Most technical interviews test the wrong things. After hiring engineers at the fintech startup, here's what I've learned actually predicts job performance. hiring engineering leadership A Go Developer Looks at Rust for Backend Work · 4 min I write Go every day at the fintech startup. Here's why I've been spending evenings with Rust, what impressed me, and where it still hurts. engineering go backend Machine Learning for Backend Engineers: What Actually Matters · 6 min What backend engineers actually need to know about ML in production -- from someone who builds NLP pipelines for financial news. ai backend engineering What I Learned Building Our Platform Team This Year · 5 min Reflections on standing up the fintech startup's platform team in 2017 — what worked, what didn't, and why treating infra like a product changed everything. platform-engineering teams engineering Stop Trying to Fix All Your Tech Debt · 4 min A two-number scoring system for tech debt that tells you what to fix now, what to schedule, and what to quietly accept. technical-debt engineering strategy Stop Counting Code Reviews and Start Reading Them · 4 min Most code reviews are theater. Here's what actually makes them worth the time. engineering testing teams Engineering Manager vs Tech Lead: What's Actually Different · 5 min Two leadership tracks, one fork in the road. What engineering managers and tech leads actually do day-to-day, from how we structured it at the fintech startup. hiring leadership engineering Your Startup Doesn't Need a Security Team. It Needs a Security Champion. · 5 min You can't afford a security team at a startup. But you can turn one motivated engineer per squad into a security champion — and that changes everything. security startups engineering Leading Without a Title — What Actually Works · 5 min Nobody handed me a leadership mandate at the fintech startup. I earned it through credibility, clear communication, and the unglamorous work. leadership engineering hiring 2016: The Year I Stopped Fighting Infrastructure · 5 min A personal look back at 2016 -- Docker going mainstream, Kubernetes momentum, Go adoption, and lessons from building at a mobility startup and a fintech startup. year-in-review trends engineering Building Effective Engineering Teams · 5 min What a year of building an engineering team at a mobility startup taught me about hiring, trust, and the habits that actually matter. teams engineering leadership Why We Chose Go for Our Backend Services · 6 min How Go became the default backend language at a mobility startup and a fintech startup, what it replaced, and the honest tradeoffs we accepted along the way. go backend engineering The Economics of State: Why Scaling Up Beats Sharding (Until It Doesn't) · 8 min A production-grounded case for exhausting single-server headroom with pooling, replicas, and partitioning before taking on sharding complexity. databases architecture engineering Building a Security-First Engineering Culture · 5 min Security culture is not a training program or a tool purchase. It is a set of habits that leadership enforces through consistency, not speeches. security engineering teams Why Every Developer Should Understand Networking · 3 min Too many developers treat the network as magic. It bites them in production every time. infrastructure engineering Database Migrations Without Downtime · 7 min A practical guide to evolving schemas without maintenance windows by keeping old and new code compatible at every step. databases devops engineering Hiring Engineers When You Can't Compete on Salary · 6 min You cannot outpay Big Tech, but you can outshine it on impact, growth, autonomy, and clarity. This is how to hire great engineers with a startup offer in 2016. hiring startups engineering Building Resilient Systems: Lessons from Production Failures · 7 min Production incidents show where architecture bends and breaks. Lessons on designing for failure, limiting blast radius, and making recovery routine. reliability architecture engineering The Real Cost of Running Your Own Servers in 2016 · 3 min Most startups have no business running their own servers. The math is not close. cloud infrastructure startups Continuous Deployment Without the Chaos · 6 min Continuous deployment is a discipline problem, not a tooling problem. We deploy a mobility startup's backend dozens of times a day because we built habits first. ci-cd devops engineering Security Incident Response for Startups · 9 min A practical incident response playbook for small teams: define incidents, assign owners, contain fast, investigate calmly, and recover with clear communication. security incident-management startups API Design Principles That Stand the Test of Time · 5 min Lessons from building a fintech financial data API: the REST conventions that actually matter, the ones that don't, and why consistency beats cleverness. api engineering architecture Postgres vs MySQL in 2016: A Practical Comparison · 5 min A grounded look at PostgreSQL and MySQL as of April 2016, focusing on integrity, query power, and operational tradeoffs rather than benchmark hype. databases architecture engineering Building a DevOps Culture from Scratch · 5 min DevOps is a cultural shift, not a job title. A practical path to shared responsibility, fast feedback, and resilient delivery without hand-wavy promises. devops teams engineering The True Cost of Technical Debt · 3 min A pragmatic look at technical debt: how it shows up, how to measure it, and how to make a business case for paying it down without stalling delivery. technical-debt engineering leadership Why Microservices Aren't Always the Answer · 5 min Most teams adopt microservices too early and pay for complexity they don't need yet. A well-structured monolith is faster, simpler, and keeps your options open. architecture microservices startups
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