Software Engineering
Estimation: Why It Fails and What Works Better
Why software estimates are systematically wrong in the same direction, and the practices that produce more useful forecasts than a single number ever could.
3 min read
Tag
Engineering Culture
11 articles
Amazon
Two Pizzas, One Team: Amazon's Operational Culture Beyond the Slogan
How Amazon's two-pizza teams, operational readiness reviews, and correction-of-error documents work together as an operating system, not just slogans.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Architecture Decision Records: Lightweight Decision Memory
Why undocumented architectural decisions get relitigated endlessly, and how a lightweight ADR practice preserves the reasoning without becoming bureaucratic.
3 min read
Career
Onboarding to a New Team Effectively in 90 Days
A practical framework for the first 90 days on a new engineering team, from mapping the codebase to earning trust before shipping big changes.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Trunk-Based Development and Merge Queues
How trunk-based development and merge queues reduce integration pain compared to long-lived feature branches, and what they require to work in practice.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Blameless Postmortems That Actually Change Things
Why most postmortems produce a document nobody acts on, and what separates a blameless postmortem process that genuinely prevents repeat incidents.
3 min read
Career
Giving Code Review Feedback That Lands
How to write code review comments that engineers actually act on, without triggering defensiveness or turning review into a status contest.
3 min read
Spotify
Squads, Tribes, and Chapters: Spotify's Org Model and Its Trade-offs
Why Spotify organized engineering around autonomous squads instead of functional teams, and what the model got right and wrong as the company scaled.
3 min read
Career
Writing Design Docs That Get Approved
Design docs stall for predictable reasons — missing context, buried trade-offs, no clear ask — and each one has a specific, fixable cause.
3 min read
Career
Being a Great Mentee and Mentor
Mentorship advice usually addresses only one side of the relationship — the skills that make it work are different depending on which seat you're in.
3 min read
Career
Habits That Distinguish Senior Engineers
Seniority shows up less in what someone knows and more in a handful of repeatable habits around scope, communication, and how they handle being wrong.
3 min read