Writing
RSSEssays on this site
How to Show Engineering Ownership When the Repositories Are Private
Every repository I have shipped production code into belongs to somebody else. This is the method I use to make ownership claims that can be judged rather than believed, and the claims it forces me to make smaller.
One Outbox Record per Notification
Two independent producers for push and in-app notifications will eventually disagree, and the disagreement is a category of bug rather than an instance of one. Making them the same record made divergence structurally impossible, and it cost me something I think was worth paying.
Surviving Your AI Providers
A retry loop around a dead provider multiplies delay instead of providing a fallback. One gateway, a capability-to-tier router, a cross-provider chain and a breaker per provider, plus the parts of this design I still count as a cost rather than a solved problem.
The Feature I Chose Not to Ship
An over-the-air update splash screen that would have covered a narrow gap during app boot, and degraded every background-to-foreground switch instead. Reproducing it on a real device, reading the dependency, and reverting.
The Spec Is the Fast Path
The received wisdom is that writing the design down is what you sacrifice for speed. Over one twelve-month tenure the documents and the release cadence grew together: 255 specifications, 207 plans, 17 runbooks and 377 production releases. This is my account of why those two things were never in tension.