Writing

Notes on building software, growing teams, and running a business.

Writings

The AI Snake Won't Eat Its Own Tail The fear is that AI-generated content poisons future training data. The fear is wrong. The real problem is worse.

Microservices Aren't the Answer, Conway's Law Is Microservices solve an org problem, not a tech problem. Get the org shape wrong and you'll ship a distributed monolith with extra latency.
Designing REST APIs That Don't Embarrass You Most REST API guides are checklists. This one is the four mistakes I see in every code review and how to avoid them.
Your API Is the Product Stop thinking of APIs as a technical surface. They're a P&L. Every developer integrating you is a customer, and every breaking change is churn.
The State of API Design REST won, GraphQL got expensive, gRPC stayed niche, and OpenAPI is the spec everyone agrees to ignore. Where we actually are.
Architecting a Telehealth Video App Without Burning Money Build it on Twilio or LiveKit, not from scratch. The interesting work is everywhere else.

What an MVP Actually Is An MVP is not your product with features stripped out. It's the smallest thing you can build to learn one specific thing.
Build an eCommerce MVP in a Weekend Shopify, Stripe, a domain, and a product page. If you're scoping six months of engineering before you sell anything, you've already lost.
How to Build an MVP Most MVP advice is a checklist. The real work is killing scope. Here's how I do it.
What You Actually Need Before Building an MVP Not a spec. Not a roadmap. Not a Figma. One sentence — the riskiest assumption your business depends on.
The Best Framework to Build an MVP Is the One You Already Know Founders ask which stack. The answer is whichever stack you can ship tonight. Stop optimizing for a refactor you'll never do.
Re-reading The Lean Startup, Fifteen Years Later The book aged well. The cargo culting did not. What still holds up and what got butchered by every accelerator since.
When Low-Code Is the Right Answer (and When It's a Trap) Low-code is a great prototype and a terrible product. The trick is knowing which phase you're in.

TDD in Practice, Not in Theory Strict TDD is a religion. Tests-as-you-go is engineering. The distinction matters more than the dogma.
Agile Without the Theater Two-week sprints, daily standups, and burndown charts are not Agile. They are ritual. Real Agile is shorter feedback loops, which most teams refuse to actually measure.
What CI/CD Actually Costs (and What It Saves) The pitch is faster releases. The real value is fewer rollbacks. Here's the math, and where it breaks.
Testing and Debugging — The Two Skills Senior Engineers Are Actually Paid For Writing code is the easy part. Debugging at 2am with no logs and an angry CEO is the job. Here's what I learned about both.
Recruiting Engineers When Everyone Is Doing It Wrong Take-home tests, whiteboard coding, and culture fit interviews mostly don't work. Here's what does, after hiring hundreds at Mayven.
What It Actually Costs to Hire a Team of Developers The salary is the smallest line item. Recruiting fees, ramp time, tooling, and turnover are where the budget actually goes.

Building Digital Products With a Remote Team Remote works. Remote-without-async-discipline doesn't. The difference is one specific habit most teams refuse to adopt.
How to Actually Communicate With a Remote Engineering Team More meetings is the wrong answer. More writing is the right one. Here's the operating model that worked across 17 countries.