3 min read
Leadership
Why juniors need more guidance now
AI coding tools can hide when junior developers need help. Senior engineers need to provide context early and help juniors develop judgment.
The notebook
Ideas tested
against real work.
Notes on software architecture, AI, and technical leadership, grounded in direct work with teams and production systems.
A place to begin
Start here.
Technical ownership
Responsibility, leadership, and the business consequences of engineering decisions.
Architecture and delivery
Decisions about the system that moves work from an idea to production.
Production AI
Evaluation, data, reliability, cost, and the failures a company needs to own.
Featured article
What Type of CTO Does Your Startup Really Need?
A CTO is not just a CTO. Early-stage startups need builders, growing startups need architects, and larger companies need executives. Hiring for the wrong stage can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and push the company in the wrong direction.
Read the articleRecent writing.
All writing.
40 articles
3 min read
Leadership
Running a Model Locally Makes Your Team the Vendor
Running a model locally shifts production work to your team. Evaluate capacity, reliability, security, and engineering time before replacing an external API.
3 min read
Leadership
Before Hiring More Developers, Find Out What Is Blocking Delivery
Before hiring more engineers, trace where delivery stalls. Separate implementation capacity from unresolved decisions, dependencies, and leadership gaps.
3 min read
Architecture
Your AI System Needs a Deletion Path
Deleting an uploaded file is only one step. Design and verify deletion across extracted text, search indexes, saved answers, logs, caches, and backups.
6 min read
AI & ML
BranchOne: A System One Decision Model
BranchOne is a System One decision model that scores supplied choices from text and optional image input, returning probabilities and a selected choice.
3 min read
Architecture
Before Building an MCP Integration, Try the CLI
Before building an MCP integration, test whether an existing CLI meets the agent's needs. Weigh maintenance, permissions, reliability, and workflow fit.
3 min read
Leadership
Burning More Tokens Does Not Make Your Team More Productive
Token consumption measures AI activity, not developer productivity. Evaluate delivery, review effort, rework, reliability, and learning across the team.
7 min read
Architecture
AI Cost Starts with Architecture
Model selection, caching, context, batch processing, and bounded workflows shape AI costs. Measure the full cost of a successful resolution.
3 min read
Leadership
Coding Interviews Should Evaluate AI Collaboration
Coding interviews should evaluate how candidates collaborate with AI, verify generated code, debug failures, and take responsibility for the result.
6 min read
AI & ML
Evaluating an LLM Is Different From Evaluating a RAG System
How to evaluate language model training and RAG applications by checking task performance, retrieval, faithfulness, and the errors that matter to users.
9 min read
AI & ML
I Tested Laya After the Jev Announcement. Then I Fine-Tuned It.
Testing and fine-tuning Laya after the Jev announcement, with a complete reproduction script and an analysis of accuracy, macro F1, and hate-speech recall.
3 min read
Engineering
We Carry the Flag
Remembering my father, his belief in education, and the flag we carry from one generation to the next.
5 min read
Leadership
What Type of CTO Does Your Startup Really Need?
A CTO is not just a CTO. Early-stage startups need builders, growing startups need architects, and larger companies need executives. Hiring for the wrong stage can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and push the company in the wrong direction.
5 min read
AI & ML
Vibe Coding Is Not Sustainable If We Blindly Trust It
Vibe coding is exciting, but professional software developers cannot blindly trust AI-generated code. Like GE under Jack Welch, optimizing for short-term output while ignoring quality may take decades to backfire -- but it will.
2 min read
Leadership
AI Isn't Causing Tech Layoffs -- Over-Hiring Is
Every tech layoff headline blames AI. But the real cause is the hiring binge of 2020-2022 fueled by cheap money. AI is just the convenient excuse companies use to avoid admitting a strategic mistake.
2 min read
Architecture
Claude Got Banned From Government Systems --- Here's the Lesson.
When Claude was banned from government systems, some teams swapped providers in a day. Others faced months of refactoring. The difference? Building every integration for replaceability. Here's why this principle applies to every dependency you have.
3 min read
Engineering
Sam Altman's Worst Take: "Don't Learn to Code"
Sam Altman says don't learn to code. History says the opposite. Every time a new abstraction layer appears, the people who win are the ones who understand the layer below it. Here's why coding is your edge in the AI era.
9 min read
AI & ML
Quantizing Llama 3 8B to W8A8: A Complete Guide with LLMCompressor and vLLM
Step-by-step tutorial for quantizing Meta's Llama 3 8B Instruct model to INT8 weights and activations (W8A8) using LLMCompressor, then serving it with vLLM for production inference with KV cache and continuous batching.
3 min read
Leadership
3 Types of Developers. Only One Will Survive.
The gap between developers who integrate AI into their workflow and those who don't is about to become enormous. Here's why AI-Native developers are outperforming traditional developers by months, and which type will survive.
4 min read
Leadership
Your Company's AI Strategy Is EMBARRASSING And Everyone Knows It
Your company's AI strategy is all theater and no action. Here's why your engineers are laughing at you, and what you can do to actually ship something instead of endlessly identifying use cases.
4 min read
AI & ML
The AI vs Teen Driver Comparison Is Wrong (Here's What Everyone Forgets)
Why comparing AI training to teen drivers is misleading - exploring the hidden assumptions about human learning, prior knowledge, and what we should really be asking about AI development.
4 min read
AI & ML
Stop Letting AI Write Your Code: The SCORE Framework for Responsible AI Development
AI coding tools are great, but in a real company with real repos, you can't just paste code without understanding it. The SCORE framework keeps you in control when using tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.
3 min read
Engineering
My 8-Year-Old Built 30 Games in 30 Days (Then This Happened)
How an 8-year-old discovered AI tools are sandboxes, not screwdrivers - building 30+ games with Claude Code, then surprising everyone by creating a school presentation. A story about gamification, exploratory learning, and the next generation approach to AI.
5 min read
AI & ML
Meta's Code World Models: Understanding Code Execution, Not Just Syntax
Explore Meta's groundbreaking Code World Models research that teaches AI to understand code semantics and execution behavior, not just syntax. Learn how this 32B parameter model simulates program execution and what it means for bug-free software development.
6 min read
Leadership
StarRocks Vector Search: Production-Ready Setup in 6 Steps
Complete guide to implementing vector search in StarRocks 3.5.5. Learn how to set up HNSW and IVFPQ indexes, load embeddings, and run efficient ANN queries in your existing OLAP cluster.
3 min read
Engineering
You're Vibe Coding Wrong
The framework for when to vibe code, when to engineer, and how to avoid the permanent prototype trap. Learn the systematic approach to graduate from exploration to production-ready software.
3 min read
AI & ML
How Two Ancient Greeks Created Modern AI (Without Knowing It)
Every time you unlock your phone, you are witnessing the outcome of one of history's most enduring intellectual battles: Plato versus Aristotle. This ancient philosophical divide actively shapes how we build software, train AI models, and design modern technology.
2 min read
Leadership
I Found the AI Cheat Code That Will Make You a 10x Developer
The key to maximizing AI development tools: treat them like team members you lead, not just code generators. Learn the mindset shift from implementer to orchestrator that multiplies your AI productivity.
5 min read
Leadership
Why 90% of Engineers Can't Debug (They're Looking in the Wrong Place)
The systematic approach to debugging complex systems by mapping end-to-end flows before diving into code. Learn how to ramp up quickly in unfamiliar environments by zooming out before zooming in.
3 min read
AI & ML
GPT-5 Fast vs Thinking vs Pro: How They Actually Work
A quick guide to understanding the differences between GPT-5 Fast, GPT-5 Thinking, and GPT-5 Pro models.
4 min read
Engineering
The AGI Definition War That's Breaking Contracts & Changing Laws
How competing definitions of Artificial General Intelligence are reshaping laws, breaking billion-dollar contracts, and determining who controls the future of AI. A critical analysis of economic, cognitive, and skeptical perspectives on AGI.
4 min read
Engineering
Don't Be a Tool Engineer
Why defining yourself by your tools instead of your problem-solving ability limits your career growth. A perspective on engineering identity, the keyword economy, and how to think like a real engineer.
4 min read
Leadership
Why Your $200k+ Engineers Are ACTUALLY Useless AND It's Your Fault
Stop treating expensive talent like expensive tools. A critical look at the communication pattern that wastes millions in engineering talent and how to fix it.
4 min read
Architecture
Why You Shouldn't Use Microservices (Unless You Should)
Microservices aren't just a technical decision, they're a team management strategy. Here's when they make sense and when they don't.
3 min read
Leadership
The Decision Chain Mindset: Why Leaders Blame the Wrong People
Understanding how strategic decisions create cascading effects and why leaders must take responsibility for the entire decision chain rather than blaming execution-level failures.
3 min read
Leadership
The Leadership Lesson I Learned from a Coffee Shop
A powerful leadership lesson discovered through observing an exceptional coffee shop manager
8 min read
Engineering
An Introduction to StarRocks: My Experience Using It (Plus My Docker Setup)
Deep dive into StarRocks OLAP database with real-world performance benchmarks, Docker setup guide, and production deployment insights for high-speed analytical workloads.
15 min read
Leadership
Understanding SIMD Performance: A Developer's Introduction with Real Benchmarks
Complete guide to SIMD performance optimization with AVX2, including real benchmarks comparing scalar vs vectorized code with GCC compiler analysis and practical implementation examples.
8 min read
AI & ML
Building an End-to-End Chat Bot with ONNX Runtime and Rust
Step‑by‑step tutorial: export a HuggingFace Transformer model to ONNX, load it in Rust, and stream chat replies token‑by‑token.
8 min read
Leadership
Envelope Encryption: The Security Pattern Every Cloud Developer Should Know
Complete guide to envelope encryption with Google Cloud KMS. Learn the security pattern that reduces costs by 10,000x with production-ready Python implementation and best practices.
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