The Last 20% Is Still the Job
April 25, 2026#ai#engineering-judgment#technical-leadership
AI can one-shot a convincing first pass, but the work that makes software valuable still lives in judgment, boundaries, and tradeoffs.
Writing
Essays and technical posts about systems, tradeoffs, and software that has to hold up in practice.
Writing for senior engineers, engineering leaders, and anyone who cares about internal systems, production software, and the technical decisions behind them.
The Problem-Solving Pace
April 28, 2024#engineering-judgment#technical-leadership#debugging
Slowing down, explaining your thinking, and focusing on process can make hard debugging work much easier.
Just Solve the Freaking Problem
April 23, 2024#engineering-judgment#technical-leadership
Before turning a small ticket into a rewrite, ask whether the business actually needs the bigger fix right now.
Choosing for Upside vs. Probability in Software Decisions
March 15, 2024#engineering-judgment#technical-leadership
A basketball analogy for software tradeoffs: sometimes the right engineering decision maximizes upside, and sometimes it maximizes the chance of success.
Accessible Nested Links
January 10, 2024#frontend#accessibility#architecture
How to make a whole card clickable without nesting links or relying on JavaScript.
Maybe You Don't Need This Library
December 17, 2023#engineering-judgment#internal-systems#architecture
Libraries are useful, but they are not free. Sometimes the right move is to write the code yourself first.
Should I Use a Form Library in Remix?
December 16, 2023#remix#frontend#engineering-judgment
Remix already gives forms a strong foundation, but complexity can still justify bringing in a library.
Translating Breadcrumbs in Remix
December 5, 2023#remix#frontend#architecture
Two clean ways to make Remix breadcrumb handles work with i18n without fighting where translation context lives.
Integrating Third-Party Services in Remix
November 23, 2023#remix#backend#architecture
A practical way to wire third-party services into Remix by treating runtime boundaries, environment variables, and SDK placement as separate problems.
Running Long-Running Tasks
November 1, 2023#production-engineering#backend#architecture
A practical guide to moving heavy work out of request handlers without overengineering it on day one.
Solving Equation Dependencies with Graphs
January 29, 2023#algorithms#problem-solving#architecture
When equations depend on each other, the real problem is dependency ordering. A graph plus topological sort makes that explicit.
Reliable E2E Tests with Playwright and Prisma
January 28, 2023#testing#backend#architecture
End-to-end tests get flaky fast when a real database is involved. Reliable suites start with isolated state and predictable execution.
Graph Traversals: BFS vs. DFS
January 26, 2023#algorithms#problem-solving
Breadth-first and depth-first search solve different problems. The useful part is knowing when the traversal order changes the answer.