Notes
Essays on the craft of engineering — reliability, judgment, taste — and the work that compounds as the tools keep changing.
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The zoo and the silence
Two months mentoring a coding bootcamp in Brunei taught me that 'senior developer' is what the title slide says. Whether you can actually explain anything — that's between you and a room of quiet faces.
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Letting other suns shine
Eleven days into being a manager, I saw a critical bug in my team's code in thirty seconds. Holding my tongue took ninety minutes. This is what I'm learning to trade for that silence.
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Attention Is All You Need — re-read, 2026 edition
Notes from re-reading the 2017 transformer paper nine years in — what held up, what didn't, and what actually matters to remember as a practitioner.
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Context windows as UX
Prompt design is interface design. The context window is not a backend detail — it's the surface your users are touching whether they know it or not.
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Reading git log as a career-long practice
The habit of reading your own commit history — not as vanity, but as the only honest record of what you actually decided, and what you were thinking when you decided it.
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Shipping your first AI feature — what I got wrong
A retrospective on the first real AI feature I shipped: the demo that worked, the production that didn't, and the four things I'd tell a younger me.
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The Mythical Man-Month, 50 years later
Brooks in 1975 on communication costs, second-system syndrome, and no silver bullets — re-read in a world where one of your team members is an LLM.
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On-call is a skill nobody teaches
Debugging under pressure, running a postmortem that actually compounds, and what years of incidents taught me about the craft of being on-call.
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The Pragmatic Programmer, 25 years on
Re-reading the 1999 classic in a world of LLM pair-programmers. What held up, what needs a footnote, and what AI didn't replace.