Engineering

5 posts in this category.

  • First Principles: Distributed Systems (Most of Yours Should Not Exist)

    Distributed systems thinking is drowning in inherited wisdom — microservices by default, horizontal scaling as a reflex, eventual consistency as a catchphrase. Strip it down to six irreducible truths and most of that...

  • First Principles: Data Engineering and ETLs

    ETL is not a law of nature, it is a convention born from constraints that no longer exist. Strip data engineering down to its irreducible truths and rebuild it from scratch. What emerges is a discipline centered on...

  • First Principles: DevOps

    Strip away the Kubernetes hype, the “DevOps Engineer” job titles, and the cargo-culted CI/CD pipelines. What’s actually true about DevOps when you reason from first principles? Five irreducible truths, six design...

  • First Principles: Software Design

    Strip away the design patterns, the SOLID principles, and the architecture astronautics. What’s actually true about software design when you reason from fundamentals? Five irreducible truths, three reconstruction...

  • First Principles: Software Observability

    Everyone knows observability means logs, metrics, and traces. But what if you strip away the vendor marketing, the inherited conventions, and the cargo-culted dashboards? What’s actually true? A first-principles...