In Practice

Direct essays on engineering practice -- testing, technical debt, planning, post-mortems, async work, the quiet habits that hold a team together.

Consulting and Craft · In Practice

The Value Is in Ideas, Not Code

LLMs have made code implementation almost trivial. The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to knowing what to ask for. Your library of patterns, concepts, and hard-won experience is now your competitive advantage.

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Consulting and Craft · In Practice

The Price of Everything

Pricing isn't a finance decision; it's a product decision. The journey from a gut-feel launch number to validated unit economics is one of the hardest things a small team has to do, and one of the most consequential.

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Consulting and Craft · In Practice

Technical Debt Is a Loan, Not a Crime

Calling something 'tech debt' is usually an accusation. It shouldn't be. Used deliberately, debt is a tool: ship something imperfect, learn from the market, pay it back with what you learned. Used carelessly, it compounds until the interest swallows the principal.

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Consulting and Craft · In Practice

The Language of Tests

Your test says 'should return 200.' RFC 2119 says 'should' means 'there may exist valid reasons to ignore this.' If it's actually a hard requirement, your test has a specification bug, and the LLM that wrote it doesn't know the difference.

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Consulting and Craft · In Practice

Code Is Read More Than It Is Written

The Law of Demeter says don't chain through objects you don't own. The real reason isn't about object-oriented purity, it's that order.Customer.Address.City is a sentence that forces the reader to hold four concepts in their head to understand one line of code.

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