LLD and HLD in the Age of AI: Judgment Over Recall
AI is lowering the cost of writing software, making judgment, code reading, production experience, and problem selection stronger engineering signals.
5 min read
~$ whoami
Big data vs. bad data
A community about the problems in data engineering — not the tools. Ten years of building warehouses from scratch, and the lesson keeps repeating: the hard part is the data and the tradeoffs, not the tooling.
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Microservices Scale Your Code. Your Data Is What Breaks.
Microservices are a scaling pattern for code. But the moment you split a service, you split its data — and distributed data is where scaling actually gets hard. A tour of the Scale Cube, database-per-service, the dual-write trap, the outbox + CDC fix, sagas, and sharding, with the cost of each named.
12 min read
The Terrarium Benchmark: On LLMs, Intuition, and Intelligence
We celebrate AI for the easy, well-documented work — apps, websites, CI/CD, boilerplate. The real test is the messy, under-documented problems with slow feedback: keeping something alive. A reflection on intuition over idealism, the limits of a probabilistic model, and a benchmark you can run with five money plants.
7 min read
Nobody Cares About Your Design Patterns — Real Engineers Think in Money
When a senior tells a junior to 'focus on the basics,' this is what they actually mean: engineering is the management of constraints — people, budget, deadline. The pointers I'd hand a junior instead of the cliché, all of which come down to translating decisions into money and chasing the thought process, not the solution.
5 min read
Building Scaling Intuition in the Age of AI
AI collapsed the cost of producing code. What's scarce now is the intuition to know what a system must do and what will quietly break — correctness first, scale second, and the judgment to direct AI well.
10 min read