Field notes from real engagements.
Engineering culture, payments, staff augmentation, and the boring parts of building software that lasts. Written by the people doing the work.
- stripe
Stripe Connect: the playbook we wish we had
Five years of shipping Stripe Connect — marketplaces, payouts, dispute handling, and the edges that turn a working demo into a robust production system.
Read post - staff-augmentation
Staff augmentation done right: five anti-patterns to avoid
Staff aug fails for predictable reasons. Here are the five most common, and what to do instead — from someone who has seen both sides of the engagement.
Read post - architecture
Why we reach for Postgres first (and second)
Most products do not need a new database. They need someone who knows Postgres well enough to stop reaching for new ones. Here is our default, and the few times we break it.
Read post - cloud-devops
The deploy pipeline that does not page you at 3am
A good deploy pipeline is boring on purpose: small changes, fast rollbacks, and enough observability to know what broke before a customer tells you.
Read post - ai-integration
Shipping AI features without betting the company on them
AI features are easy to demo and hard to make reliable. The boring approach treats the model as one unreliable dependency inside a system you still control.
Read post - mvp-engineering
An MVP is not a disposable prototype
The "minimum" in MVP is about scope, not quality. The parts you cut and the parts you never cut are what separate a fast launch from a slow rewrite.
Read post - maintenance-support
The maintenance work nobody puts on the roadmap
Dependency updates, expiring certs, and quiet capacity creep never make the roadmap — until they cause the outage. Here is the boring upkeep that keeps software alive.
Read post