This was the quote I found most impactful from my company’s recent engineering learning session on agentic workflows. While the rest of the learning session was generally pretty benign, this quote really stuck with me. As I mull over the ways that software engineering as a craft continues to evolve and change, I find that …
Dealing with operations is a challenging element of any live service. Nobody enjoys being chained to their phone and laptop at all hours of the day. Understandably, engineers often dread being on call. Never the less, a strong part of any high functioning team is operational readiness and health. There are many avenues which teams …
All systems have limits. Some limits are hard design decisions, some are soft caps set by stress testings, and some are unknown to even a systems creators. Inevitably, users locate the third type of limit and will push any system until it breaks. In light of this, I find myself encountering situations in which pagination …
When I was working at Amazon, the Principal Engineering community set about a task to define a list of books an engineer could conceivably read within a year which would have a measurable impact on the growth of their career. After much deliberation, the following list of 13 books was the result. I have personally …
Premise Several months back, I stumbled upon a reddit thread claiming that all distributed systems problems could be solved with either a cache, a queue, or sharding. I had never considered this, and while my distributed systems experience is still expanding, most systems I’ve worked on have leveraged some or all of these techniques. In …
As with most developers in the current era, I find myself constantly being asked to leverage Artificial Intelligence when programming. While the intentions are (hopefully) good, I think AI is clearly over hyped. AI developers are barely more than an executive pipe dream, but I do think working with AI tools presents a unique opportunity …
While working on personal projects, I enjoy exploring new paradigms and design patterns. I needed an interface to support transaction management in a recent project, however I wasn’t using a standard Spring application. Spring provides the @Transaction annotation which allows easy rollback and transaction isolation for web requests. While exploring alternatives, I discovered a somewhat …
On the teams I’ve worked on, it seems as though many of the issues I’ve witnessed have been caused by a lack of team cohesion. On teams where projects struggled to get done and goals had to be rigorously defined by management, it felt as though the root of the issue was a lack of …