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01
Lessons From a Decade at FAANG: What They Don't Tell You
Five uncomfortable things I learned after leaving big tech — and what I'd tell my 25-year-old self.
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02
System Design Interviews: The Framework That Got Me to L6
A repeatable structure I use for any system design question, from URL shorteners to global payments.
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03
Scaling to a Billion Users: Patterns That Actually Worked
The architecture decisions behind a system I helped build that served 1B+ DAUs, minus the marketing gloss.
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04
Why I Left Big Tech (And Why I Don't Regret It)
The messy, honest version of why I walked away from a seven-figure compensation package.
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05
The Hidden Cost of Microservices
Why most teams don't need them, and how I've watched three companies walk themselves into a distributed monolith.
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06
Reading Code Is a Superpower — Here's How to Get Better
The one skill that separated every senior engineer I respected from the rest. Mostly unglamorous.
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07
CAP Theorem in the Real World
What CAP actually means when you're on-call for a database at 2 a.m. GMT, and why PACELC is the more useful framing.
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08
How I Passed the Google L6 Interview (After Failing L5 Twice)
Two interview failures, a year off, and the specific changes that made the third attempt different.
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09
The Engineer's Guide to Code Reviews That Don't Suck
Ten rules I wish every reviewer knew, written from the receiving end of about 4,000 pull requests.
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10
Database Internals: Why Your Queries Are Slow
Five specific mechanical reasons a query can be slow. Once you know them, query plans stop being mysterious.
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11
Kubernetes at Scale: What We Learned Running 50,000 Pods
The specific ways Kubernetes stops being nice when your cluster is large. And what to do about it.
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12
AI-Native Development Workflows: A Field Report
Six months of using Claude Code and Cursor as a serious part of my workflow. What worked, what didn't.
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13
Why Every Engineer Should Learn Rust in 2026
Not to switch languages. To sharpen the mental model you use in whatever language you already know.
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14
Engineering Leadership: Transitioning From IC to Manager
The shift in how you measure your own day, and the quiet grief that comes with it.
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15
Building High-Performance Teams in Remote-First Companies
Eight things I've changed about how I run a team since everyone stopped being in the same Zone 1 office.
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16
The Economics of Cloud Computing: AWS vs GCP vs Azure
A cost comparison that takes the marketing pricing pages out of the picture. Numbers in GBP.
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17
Event-Driven Architecture: A Practical Guide
When events are the right answer, when they're a disaster, and the specific patterns I trust.
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18
Observability Done Right: Beyond Logs, Metrics and Traces
The three-pillar model is a starting point, not a destination. Here's what a mature observability stack actually looks like.
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19
Prompt Engineering for Backend Developers
Stop treating LLMs like chatbots. Start treating them like unreliable subroutines. The difference is everything.
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20
My Honest Take on Vibe Coding and the Future of Software Engineering
I've now shipped four production features I didn't write line-by-line. Here's what that actually felt like.