5 min read
Do I Miss Being a Principal Engineer? Yes and No
Someone asked if I miss being a principal engineer. What I miss, what I don't, and how to tell good reasons for staying technical from bad ones.
Engineering
8 articles
5 min read
The Code Review Comment That Wasn't About the Code
Seven years ago a tech lead answered my pull request with one question about who it was for, and it still shapes how I review code.
6 min read
Last Known Good: A Debugging Lesson From My Son's LEGO Set
My nine-year-old fixed a stuck LEGO build by going back to the last step that worked. It's the debugging discipline I'd let slip on a Fabric pipeline.
8 min read
Six Short Meetings, One Lost Day: The Real Cost of Context Switching
Why scattered 30-minute meetings can wipe out a day of deep work, what the research actually says about interruptions, and the schedule rules I now use.
7 min read
Boring Code on Purpose: Writing Software I Can Maintain at 2 AM
Why I now prefer explicit, predictable code over clever one-liners, the four questions I ask before merging, and when terse code is the better choice.
8 min read
Testing AI Systems: Which Tests Run Where, and Why
A layered test strategy for LLM apps: stubbed unit tests per commit, pass-rate gates on PRs, nightly evaluator runs and red teaming before release.
8 min read
What My Son's Autism Taught Me About Predictable Systems
Andriel needs routine, not just likes it. Living with that has changed how I design functions, error messages, API deprecations and change for my teams.
1 min read
Complex Problem Solving with o1: Practical Patterns
o1's reasoning capabilities open up new possibilities for tackling complex problems that were previously difficult for AI to handle reliably.