Architecture isn’t just technical — it’s psychological, cultural, and historical. This piece explores how ideas like Conway’s Law, DDD, and platform thinking reshaped problem decomposition and organisational design.
We follow the curve — from greedy to elastic, from clustered chaos to calm — and show how one small shift bends the whole system.
Leadership Without the Handbrake The worst kind of tech leadership doesn’t look evil. It looks helpful. It’s the tech lead reviewing every line of code. The principal engineer answering every question, solving problems before they’re fully formed. The manager saying “you own it” but needing a copy of every decision. The team lead jumping into every discussion — even when they don’t need to. It’s leadership with the handbrake half on - and it kills autonomy. ...
Most Arch install guides read like someone dumped their terminal history into a blog and called it a day. I wanted more than that. I wanted a system that was secure, fast, and didn’t ask me for a password every time I booted. I wanted TPM2-backed full-disk encryption, a modern boot process with UKI, and a layout that respected my time. And I wanted it to be repeatable — no more tinkering for hours every six months. ...
Most teams don’t fail because the people are bad. They fail because the system they’re in makes doing the right thing harder than it should be. You’ve seen it before. Talented engineers grinding away, frustrated by endless blockers. Architecture that’s more cage than canvas. Leadership that says “go fast” but needs a meeting for every change. That’s not a team problem. That’s an org design problem. The API Memo That Changed the Internet In the early 2000s, Jeff Bezos sent a now-famous internal memo to every team at Amazon: ...
This isn’t just about faster hash tables. It’s about breaking long-standing assumptions — and what that shift means for building tighter, simpler, more resilient systems.
The Invisible Ceilings of Cloud Infrastructure What Pinterest’s EC2 throttling incident—and others like it—teach us about building resilient systems in a black box world. When the Cloud Slows Down, Quietly It started with user complaints. Pages were loading slowly. API calls were timing out. Internal dashboards lagged behind real-time. Something was wrong—but none of the usual suspects showed up. No alerts fired. No dashboards lit up. Logs were clean. And yet the system was clearly sick. ...