Insights

Notes from people who are still writing code

No thought leadership, no listicles. Just what our engineers learned on real projects, usually the expensive way.

Featured · Architecture · 12 min read

We deleted 60% of our microservices and everything got faster

A client arrived with 38 services maintained by nine engineers. Two years later they run fourteen and deploy four times as often. Here is the decision framework we used to decide what got merged, what got deleted, and what genuinely deserved to stay independent — plus the two consolidations we regret.

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Latest

Recent writing

Applied AI · 9 min read

Your RAG system does not have a retrieval problem

Nine times out of ten the embeddings are fine and the chunking is the bug. A practical checklist for diagnosing which layer is actually failing.

Security · 7 min read

SOC 2 in ninety days without stopping the roadmap

The controls that take real engineering time, the ones you can automate in an afternoon, and how to tell the two apart before you commit to an audit date.

Platform · 6 min read

The cloud bill is a design document

Every line item on an AWS invoice describes an architectural decision someone made. Reading it backwards is the fastest audit we know.

Design · 8 min read

Design systems fail for organisational reasons

The component library is rarely the problem. Ownership, versioning and who is allowed to say no are what determine whether anyone uses it.

Data · 11 min read

Event sourcing is worth it exactly twice

Two problem shapes where an append-only log pays for its complexity — and the far longer list of cases where a well-indexed table wins.

Practice · 5 min read

How we run an incident at 3am

Our actual runbook, including the parts that are about communication rather than debugging — which is most of it.

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