Code Review
Review the Error Path First, Because That Is Where It Will Break
Happy path code is reviewed carefully and error handling gets a glance. That is backwards. Here is the checklist I run on every catch block, every wrapped…
Opinion
Your Runbook Describes a System You Do Not Have
Runbooks get written when the system is designed and never tested again. The first incident shows you the gap, at the worst possible moment, to the person…
Opinion
Five Things I Was Confidently Wrong About
Positions I argued for, sometimes loudly, that turned out to be mistaken. What changed my mind in each case.
Debugging
Your Error Messages Are a User Interface
An error message is read by a person under stress who needs to make a decision. Almost nobody designs them that way.
Engineering Culture
Most Postmortems Are Theatre and Here Is What Makes One Useful
A document nobody reads, listing action items nobody does, produced to satisfy a process. Here is the version that actually changes something.
Debugging
The Abstraction That Made Debugging Take All Day
Every layer you add to avoid repetition adds a place where the truth can hide. Here is how to tell which abstractions earn their cost.
DevOps
What to Do in the First Ten Minutes of an Incident
The instinct is to start investigating. The first ten minutes are better spent on four other things, and doing them makes the investigation faster.
AI
Why AI Generated Code Passes Tests and Still Breaks Production
Green CI, clean review, broken production. The gap is that tests check whether code matches the implementation and production checks whether it matches reality.
AI
Multi Agent Systems Fail in the Handoffs
Each agent works fine alone. Chain them and quality collapses. The failure is almost always at the boundary between them.
Engineering Culture
Feature Flags Are Technical Debt With a Good Excuse
They are genuinely useful and every one you leave in place multiplies the number of code paths nobody tests. Here is how to keep the benefit.
AI
Prompt Injection Is Not a Bug You Can Patch
Every mitigation at the model layer can be worked around. The fix is architectural: assume the model will be compromised and limit what it can do.
DevOps
Your CI Pipeline Has More Access Than Your Engineers Do
A build system with production credentials and the ability to run arbitrary code from a pull request is the most under-secured part of most stacks.