Opinion
Fast Is a Feature, and a Feature Needs an Owner
Performance regresses by accretion, one reasonable change at a time, because nobody owns the budget, and a property with no owner is a cost with a deadline.
Engineering Culture
One Hundred Posts About Things Breaking
What I learned writing a hundred debugging writeups, including which ones people actually read and what that says about technical content.
Opinion
Meetings Are a Tax on the Maker Schedule
A calendar with a meeting every afternoon does not look expensive, because the cost is invisible: it is the morning deep work that never starts, fragmented…
Opinion
Estimates Are Not Commitments, and the Confusion Costs You
The estimate became a date, the date became a promise, and the promise taught engineers to pad, hide and cut corners.
Shopify
Your Theme Has 340 Settings and Merchants Use Eleven of Them
Every setting is a conditional in Liquid, a branch in CSS and a support question. I counted what a real theme actually used, and the answer changed how I…
Opinion
An Agent Should Never Merge Its Own Pull Request
The agent wrote the change, ran its own checks, and merged, and every control in that loop shared the same blind spot.
Engineering Culture
Teaching Someone to Debug Is Harder Than Teaching Them to Code
Syntax is teachable in a week. The thing that separates a good debugger from a bad one is a skill nobody quite knows how to transmit.
Opinion
AI Wrote It, So Nobody Owns It, and That Is the Incident
The postmortem could not find an owner for the defective code, because the author was a suggestion, the merger was a keystroke, and the reviewer skimmed a…
Opinion
An AI Agent Cannot Debug a System You Cannot Describe
The agent read the whole repository and still could not find the bug, because the bug was the gap between what the code does and what it was supposed to do…
Opinion
Blameless Postmortems Went Too Far in the Other Direction
Removing blame from incident reviews also removed accountability, and now the same decision recurs quarterly with a new author.
Opinion
Technical Debt Is the Wrong Metaphor
Debt implies a known principal, a rate and a repayment plan. Most of what we call technical debt is none of those.
Opinion
Code Coverage Tells You What Ran, Not What Was Checked
Coverage counts executed lines, and a test can execute a branch while asserting nothing about it. The number rises while the protection stays flat, which is…