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
Category
Software Engineering
15 articles
Software Engineering
SOLID Principles Without the Strawmen
What each SOLID principle actually asks of your code, shown with realistic examples instead of Animal-extends-Dog toys.
3 min read
Software Engineering
The Strangler Fig Pattern for Legacy Replacement
How the strangler fig pattern lets you replace a legacy system incrementally behind a routing layer, avoiding the failure modes of a big-bang rewrite.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Writing Engineering Docs People Actually Read
Docs organized around questions instead of topics, with explicit freshness and ownership, are the ones that stay accurate and get reused.
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
Software Engineering
Monorepo vs. Polyrepo: The Trade-offs That Actually Matter
Monorepos and polyrepos both work at scale — the real decision is which trade-offs your organization is already equipped to absorb.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Feature Flags Architecture: Beyond the Boolean Toggle
Release flags, experiment flags, and ops flags need different lifecycles — a flag system without a removal process always accumulates debt.
3 min read
Software Engineering
API Versioning and Deprecation Policy
A practical framework for versioning APIs and deprecating old versions without breaking clients you don't control or can't even see.
3 min read
Software Engineering
The Testing Pyramid, Revisited
The testing pyramid was always a proxy for a cost trade-off — here's the trade-off itself, and when the pyramid's shape doesn't apply.
2 min read
Software Engineering
Managing Technical Debt Deliberately
Technical debt taken on deliberately with a repayment plan gets paid back; debt that accumulates silently almost never does.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Refactoring Safely With Characterization Tests
Characterization tests pin down what legacy code actually does, bugs included, so you can refactor safely without a real specification.
3 min read
Software Engineering
Naming as Design, Not Decoration
A name is a promise about behavior, cost, and side effects — bad names mislead quietly, and that cost compounds across every reader.
2 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
Code Review Culture That Scales Past Ten Engineers
Why code review that works at five engineers breaks at fifty, and the concrete conventions that keep review fast and fair as teams grow.
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