Tagged software-engineering
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The Skills Sprawl Problem Nobody Was Looking For
Or: How 56 Repos Quietly Appeared While We Were Busy Being Impressed With AI
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Extreme DRY: When ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’ Repeats All Your Other Problems
Or: How the Engineering Principle You Learned First Quietly Strangles the Architecture You’re Trying to Build
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The Floor Plan Is Your First Architecture Decision
Or: Your Seating Chart Is Picking Your Software Architecture, Whether You Like It or Not
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Design Thinking Is Not a Workshop — It’s a Hiring Criteria
Or: Why Your Two-Day Empathy Exercise Won’t Fix a Feature Factory
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The Directness Dial: Teaching Engineers to Be Honest Without Being Brutal
Or: Why “Too Respectful” Is Just as Dangerous as “Too Blunt”
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Teaching the Agent What You Know: How to Build, Test, and Ship AI Coding Skills That Actually Hold…
Or: Your AI Assistant Is as Naive as the Day It Was Hired — and That’s Your Fault
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Teaching Engineers to Speak in Constraints
Or: Why “We Can’t Do That” and “Sure, No Problem” Are Both Lies
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The Biggest Problem With Our Codebase Is the Developers
Or: What Platform Teams Actually Exist For (And Why Most Get It Completely Backwards)
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Introducing DX Telemetry Manager
Or: An Open Source Dashboard for the Developer Inner Loop
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What We Actually Instrumented — and What We Found
Or: Three Engineers, One Hardware Correlation, and the Test Suite Nobody Was Running
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The Inner Loop Nobody Measures
Or: Why Your Production Monitoring Is Excellent and Your Developer Experience Is a Black Box
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What It Looks Like When It’s Working
Or: The Engineer Who Brings You Problems You Didn’t Know You Had
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Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission
Or: The Four Words That Changed How an Entire Room Understood Failure
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The Process That Punishes the Behaviour You’re Building
Or: Why Your Engineers Stopped Taking Initiative — and Scrum Helped
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Why Your Engineers Are Still Waiting
Or: The Ownership Problem Nobody Admits They Created
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The Thematic Quarter: Why Your OKRs Are Fighting Each Other
Or: How a Book About Silos Changed How We Set Goals
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Your New System Is Done. Now Good Luck Getting 40 Teams to Care.
Or: What Nobody Tells You About Retiring a Legacy System
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Knowing It’s Fixed: How to Actually Validate a Performance Improvement
Or: Shipping a Fix Is Not the Same as Knowing It Worked
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Where Web Performance Actually Lives
Or: Why Your Frontend Engineer Can’t Fix What Isn’t a Frontend Problem
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The Autopsy Nobody Wants to Do
Or: A Field Guide to the Execution Post-Mortem
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Your Performance Dashboard Is Lying to You
Or: How to Actually See the Problem Before You Try to Fix It
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A Brief History of Web Performance at Agoda
Or: What Ten Years of Measuring the Wrong Things Taught Us About Measuring the Right Ones
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When Designers and Engineers Disagree (And Both Are Right)
Or: Why the Best Products Come from Arguments Nobody Wins
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The Business Logic Your Engineers Can’t See
Or: Why Technical Excellence Without Domain Understanding Is Expensive
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Stop Copying Prod Into Dev: Test Data Strategies That Actually Scale
Or: Your Database Snapshots Are a Confession, Not a Solution
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The History Lesson Nobody Wanted: Why Your Team Is Living in 1985
Or: How We Forgot What Agile Actually Meant and Built a Cargo Cult Instead
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The Lego Problem: Why Engineers Add Complexity Instead of Removing It
Or: Why Your Architecture Reviews Have a Benefit Slide and No Cost Slide
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Designing APIs That Outlive Your Current Sprint
Or: Why Your API Contract Is the Most Important Code You’ll Never Unit Test
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Show Me the Architecture and I’ll Show You the Silos
Or: How We Broke Down Our Monolith and Accidentally Built Walls Between Our Teams
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Resilience Isn’t a Feature — It’s the Absence of Naivety
Or: Why Your System Is One Slow Query Away from a Very Bad Night
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The Bug That Won
Or: Why Your Best Experiment This Quarter Might Be Sitting in Your Bug Backlog
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Your DNA Document Is Dead Without a Voice: How Recognition Shapes Engineering Culture
Or: The CTO’s Loudest Tool Isn’t a Strategy Doc — It’s a Slack Message
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The T-Shaped Trap: Why Your Org Says It Wants Versatile Engineers but Punishes Them for It
Or: Stop Hiring Full-Stack Engineers and Start Building Full-Stack Teams
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Your Engineers Don’t Trust Your Data (And They’re Probably Right)
Or: Why Your Analytics Pipeline Is the Most Expensive Lie in Your Stack
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The Signature Question: How Culture Actually Spreads
Or: Why Your Values Document Is Collecting Dust While One Person’s Habit Is Rewriting Your Organisation
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Your Senior Engineers Are Trapped in Sprint Tickets — And You Put Them There
Or: Why Giving Someone a Title Without Giving Them Time Is Just Gaslighting with Extra Steps
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The UX Debt Nobody’s Tracking: Why Your Engineers Think “Working” Means “Done”
Or: Why Your Feature Works Perfectly and Ruins Lives
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Your Meetings Are Broken (Yes, Even the In-Person Ones)
Or: Why Being in the Same Room Doesn’t Mean You’re in the Same Conversation
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The Prototype That Became Production
Or: Why “It Was Only Supposed to Take Two Sprints” Is the Most Expensive Sentence in Software
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Your Team Is Too Respectful (And It’s Killing Your Product)
Or: Why Silence Isn’t Agreement and Nodding Isn’t Understanding
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Your Engineers Can’t Negotiate — And It’s Your Fault
Or: Why “We Can’t Do That” and “Sure, No Problem” Are Both Career-Limiting Answers
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Experimentation Theatre: The A/B Test That Taught You Nothing
Or: Why Running 200 Experiments a Quarter Doesn’t Mean You’re Learning
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Is This Scrum, or Is This Just Meetings?
Or: A Diagnostic for the Disease Nobody Admits They Have
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Developer Experience Is a Product — You Just Don’t Have a Product Manager for It
Or: You Already Know How to Build Products. You Just Forgot Your Developers Are Users Too.
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The Solutioneering Trap: Why Your Best Engineers Are Solving the Wrong Problems
Or: How a Perfectly Good Prototype Taught Me We Were Asking the Wrong Question
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Recognition Is a Safety Signal (Not a Reward)
Or: Why Your Team Already Knows What You Actually Value — Even If You Haven’t Said It
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Co-location, Remote First, and the Rollback Every Few Decades
Or: Why the Most Important Architecture Decision Is Your Floor Plan
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Why Empathy Is a Technical Skill
Or: Your Users Aren’t Edge Cases, and Neither Are Their Feelings
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Silent Standby: The Invisible Tax on Your Engineering Velocity
Or: Why Your Sprint Is a Two-Week Hiding Spot for Waiting
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The Tech Time Tightrope: Why Scrum Has No Handle for Technical Health
Or: How to Stop Drowning in Debt When Your Process Only Speaks Features
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The Security Afterthought: Why You Won’t Care Until You’re on the Front Page
Or: Why Your Security Culture Needs to Grow Up Before Your Company Does
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The Phantom Stakeholder: Why You’re Building for Someone Who Doesn’t Exist
Or: How “Because Legal Said So” Became the Most Expensive Sentence in Software Engineering
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The Pressure Is Coming From Inside the House
Or: Why Your Engineers Are Burning Out and Nobody’s Asking Them to
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The Dashboard Delusion: Why Your Metrics Are Just Expensive Wallpaper
Or: Why Your Team Spent Two Sprints Building Beautiful Charts That Nobody Checks
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The Design Handoff Is a Lie: Why Your Engineers and Designers Are Playing Telephone
Or: What Pixar’s Brain Trust Can Teach You About Product Development
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The Design Review That Reviews Nothing
Or: Why Your Engineers Are Asking for Permission When They Should Be Writing Code
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The 1:1 Is Broken (And You’re Both to Blame)
Or: Why the Most Important 30 Minutes of Your Week Has Become the Least Honest
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The Config File That Runs Your Company: Why Your Most Important Code Isn’t Code
Or: How a Missing Comma Took Down an Entire Product Page
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Your Roadmap Is a Lie You Tell Yourselves Every Quarter
Or: Why Architectural North Stars Matter More Than Your Q3 Technical Roadmap
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The Slack Channel Graveyard: Why Your “Async Culture” Is Just Loneliness at Scale
Or: Why #architecture-decisions Has Been Dead Since That One “Thanks!” Seven Months Ago
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The Onboarding Cliff: Why Your New Engineers Are Productive at Month Six (If They’re Still Here)
Or: What Restaurant Kitchens Mastered That Tech Companies Haven’t
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The Migration That Never Ships: Why Your Team’s Best Intentions Are Paving the Road to Technical…
Or: Why 80% Complete Is the Most Dangerous Number in Engineering
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The Helpful Senior Who Isn’t: Why Your Best Engineers Are Accidentally Breaking Your Team
Or: How Mentorship Became a Trap and Nobody Noticed Because It Looked So Good on Peer Reviews
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The Greenfield Myth: Why Your New Service Is Already Legacy Code
Or: Why “This Time We’ll Do It Right” Is the Most Expensive Lie in Engineering
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The Business Model Blindspot: Why Your Engineers Don’t Know How Your Company Makes Money
Or: We Shipped It, But We Can’t Explain Why It Matters
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The Craftsman’s Dilemma: Why Your Best Engineers Are Your Biggest Overengineering Risk
Or: Why the Engineers Who Care Most About Quality Are Building Solutions Nobody Asked For
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The Ownership Illusion: Why Your Platform Team Is Building Solutions to Problems That Don’t Exist
Or: How We Spent Three Years Maintaining a Band-Aid on a Bullet Wound
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The Senior Engineer Plateau
Or Why Your Best People Are Quietly Rotting
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The Hiring Bar Is a Lie You Tell Yourself
Or: Why Your Interview Process Selects for Interview Skills
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On-Call Shouldn’t Feel Like Punishment
Or: Why Your Engineers Treat Production Alerts Like Car Alarms in a Parking Lot
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The Documentation Graveyard
Or: Why Nobody Reads Your Confluence and What to Do About It
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The Tragedy of Shared Code: Why Your Most Critical Infrastructure Is Already Dying
Or: Nobody Owns the Basement, and Now the Whole Building Is Sinking
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The COVID Hangover Is Killing Your Engineering Velocity
Or: Why Walking Twenty Metres Beats Two Weeks of Slack Messages
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The Org Chart Trap: Why Your Company Structure Is Silently Killing Velocity
Or: How to Stop Building Bureaucracy and Start Building Teams That Actually Ship
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The Question That Changes Everything
Or: Why Asking Engineers “How Can We Do This Faster?” Is the Worst Question You Can Ask
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The AI Coding Trap: Why 95% of Companies Are Measuring the Wrong Thing
Or: Your AI Can Write Code. So What?
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The Feature Team Fallacy: Why Your “Agile” Teams Are Just Waterfall in Disguise
Or: How We Accidentally Recreated 1990s Software Development with Better Tooling
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Recognition: The Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You
Or: Why Your Best Engineers Might Be One Missed “Thank You” Away from LinkedIn
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I Don’t Care What You Build (And Neither Should You)
Or: Why Your Design Reviews Are Missing the Point Entirely
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The Expensive Illusion of Intuition: Why Your Product Team Is Probably Wrong
Or: How a Slightly Misplaced Price Column Nearly Cost Us Millions
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Centralization Is Contention: The Hidden Tax on Your Engineering Velocity
Or: Why Every Centralized Team Becomes a Bottleneck (And the Math to Prove It)
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The 40-Minute Pipeline: Why Your Build System Is Making You Dumber
Or: How We Measured What Everyone Suspects But Nobody Wants to Talk About
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The Regenerate Button: Why Your Snapshot Tests Are Lying to You
Or: The Most Dangerous Command in Your Test Suite
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The Data Trap: Why Your Company Will Never Be “Data-Driven”
Or: How Developer Experience Became the Secret Weapon Nobody’s Talking About
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Breaking Engineering Silos: The Uncomfortable Truth About Collaboration
Or: Why Your Teams Are Islands and What You’re Actually Going to Have to Do About It
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Please Stop Asking AI to Count Your Tabs
Or: Why Your LLM Is the Most Expensive Linter in History
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The Automation That Isn’t: Why Your CI Pipeline Is Just a Very Expensive Reminder App
Or: How We Built Machines to Tell Humans to Do the Work Machines Should Be Doing
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“But, But… My Points!”: The Story Point Trap That’s Killing Your Engineering Culture
Or: Why Your Team Might Be Measuring Success While Missing the Point Entirely
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The Taste Gap: Why Your Engineering Teams Keep Solving the Same Problems Differently
Or: Why Your ADRs Are Unread and Your Guilds Are Dead
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Semantic Monitoring: The Question You’re Not Asking About Your Production Systems
Or: Why Your Dashboards Are Green and Your Business Is Bleeding
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Watch Me: The Defiance-to-Data Pipeline
Or: Why Your Best Engineering Decisions Start with Spite and End with Spreadsheets
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Code Entropy: The Silent Killer of Engineering Velocity
Or: Why Your Codebase Is Slowly Dying and Nobody’s Talking About It
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When Good Unit Tests Go Bad
Or: Why Your Green CI Pipeline Might Be Lying to You
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The “We Have a Team for That” Fallacy
Or: How We Built Organizational Silos and Called It Specialization
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The Five-Day Sprint That Should Have Been Four Hours
Or: How We Stopped Using CI as a Debugging Tool and Learned to Love Data
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The Art of Engineering Constraints
“Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines.” — Enzo Ferrari
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Technical Debt: The Elephant in the Scrum Room
Or: Why Your Product Owner Shouldn’t Be the Only One Steering the Ship
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Boxes must be Green, Lines must go Up
“The moment you make a metric a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” — Charles Goodhart, economist
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The Survey Paradox: Why Less Is More in Developer Feedback
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” — William James
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The Tangled Web We Weave: How Moving Fast Led Us Down the Synchronous Coupling Rabbit Hole
“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” — Warren Buffett
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Your Linting Rules: Are They the Police or a Teacher?
I. Introduction
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The F5 Experience (Testing)
Part of the F5 Experience is also running tests. Can I open my IDE and “just run the tests” after cloning a project?
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The F5 Experience (Speed)
Is a term I’ve been using for years; I originally learned it from a consultant I worked with at Readify years ago.
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Push Groups: Encouraging Adoption of New Tools and Technologies
Another process I’ve been trialling I wanted to share:
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Mobathons: Blending Mob Programming and Hackathons
This is something we’ve been experimenting with recently, so I thought I’d share.