Serverless Done Right
Serverless works for event-driven, bursty, stateless workloads. Here's how to avoid cold start pain, manage state, choose the right granularity, and know when containers are better....
Mutation Testing Primer: Finding Real Bugs
Mutation testing answers what coverage can't: do your tests actually catch bugs? Learn how to use mutation testing tools to find the gaps in your test suite and write tests that genuinely verify corre...
The Layer Tax: Every Abstraction Has a Price
Every abstraction layer has a cost. Benchmarks showing the real price of convenience from someone who built fast systems in the 90s and slow ones today....
The Best Code I Ever Wrote Was Deleted
The hardest skill in software engineering isn't writing code - it's knowing when to delete it. Stories of systems that improved by subtraction....
The Integration Tax: Every API Has a Price
Third-party API integration costs 56% more than initial estimates when you account for maintenance, breaking changes, and troubleshooting. The integration tax is real and ongoing....
Write Your Own Build Scripts
Build tool complexity has gotten out of control. A 50-line shell script often does the job better than any framework....
Your Database Is Already the Best API You'll Ever Write
For decades we buried databases under layers of abstraction. Tools like PostgREST and Supabase show that PostgreSQL with Row-Level Security is often the best API you'll ever write....
Why Engineers Should Own Their Build System
Build systems have become black boxes that nobody understands. When they break, teams are helpless. Here's the case for simpler builds that engineers actually control....
Feature Flags Are Technical Debt
Feature flags promised safe deployments but delivered hidden complexity. Research shows 73% never get removed, costing teams $125K+ yearly in maintenance overhead....
The Framework Treadmill: Why We Keep Relearning the Same Problems
The JavaScript framework ecosystem keeps solving the same problems with new syntax every 2-3 years. State management, routing, data fetching - we've reinvented these solutions dozens of times since 20...
Code Review Is Broken
Code review as practiced by most teams is a bottleneck that provides less value than we pretend. Small PRs, distributed reviewing, and time SLAs can fix it....
The Rewrite Trap: Why 90% of Rewrites Fail
Software rewrites fail 90% of the time. The Netscape disaster proved it. Here's why incremental improvement beats the clean slate fantasy, and what to do instead....