Posts connected by the systems-thinking tag.
📅 July 10, 2026
⏱️ 11 min read
Agentic tooling made pull requests cheap and plentiful, so the bottleneck moved from writing code to trusting it. The answer is not another review loop but front-loaded rigor: invest the engineering effort ahead of time to build a full, production-shaped synthetic environment you run locally, so that validation itself becomes cheap and the PR turns into a context-sharing mechanism instead of an approval gate. Tools like .NET Aspire and Dapr show what that inner loop can look like, and the same principles carry over to homegrown systems.
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📅 July 03, 2026
⏱️ 6 min read
Kahneman's two modes of thinking (fast System 1 and slow System 2) map onto learning to ride a bicycle. Attention gives way to automaticity, and that same arc is a methodology for thinking about agents, leverage, and engineering systems.
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📅 July 03, 2026
⏱️ 6 min read
Blameless engineering, borrowed from Google's SRE culture, is usually filed under postmortems. But the postmortem is only the last place the culture shows up. Blamelessness shifts all the way left into how you design systems, and it lands on one uncomfortable rule: the team is the unit of work, and heroes are a symptom of a system that is not yet well crafted. In the age of agents, where there is no one to blame, that rule stops being a nicety and becomes the only way to debug at all.
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📅 July 02, 2026
⏱️ 9 min read
I used to say bad version, bad rollout, bad payload. I stopped, because a version isn't good or bad in the abstract. It's a distribution of outcomes across a population of users, configs, and use cases. The same payload can be flawless for 99% and broken for 0.5%, and calling it bad collapses that spectrum onto one label that quietly dictates how you triage, communicate, and remember the incident.
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📅 July 02, 2026
⏱️ 11 min read
When I was starting out, hesitation held me back from trying things. Over time it faded, not because I got braver, but because I got a better handle on risk. Fearless engineering is not the absence of caution. It is a calculated read of what you know, what you do not, and how far a change can reach.
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📅 June 27, 2026
⏱️ 8 min read
Salty is not the opposite of sweet. They are separate receptors, separate dials, and salted caramel exists because you can turn up both at once. Most 'balance' advice is secretly slider-thinking. The method is to catch the false opposite, test for a real tradeoff, and go to the corner everyone told you was impossible.
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📅 May 30, 2026
⏱️ 8 min read
Tanya Reilly's 'Being Glue' names the invisible human work that holds a team together but never shows up on your own record. The deeper pattern is the same one behind every high-maintenance system: a person standing in for a fix that was never made. The goal is not to be better glue, it is to build systems that heal themselves so humans are needed as glue as rarely as possible.
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