Tag
Suggestions, advice and reflections on the software career.
There are 17 posts with this tag.
Work an agent finishes in days takes a week inside a system that has been running for years — because there the cost isn't producing code, it's finding the rules and proving them.
Knowledge stuck in one person's head and knowledge buried in a wiki nobody reads end up in the same place: the reasoning behind the decision is unreachable.
The moment a role gap gets closed by individual sacrifice it becomes invisible — and an invisible fault never gets fixed. How to draw a boundary, seen from three desks.
Process isn't a virtue — it's a coordination tax you pay. When it should be added, why it never gets removed, and how it looks from three different desks.
Companies don't fail at going fast or going slow — they fail at matching the speed to the decision. A reversibility frame, and three desks to view it from.
What separates company types isn't headcount — it's where decisions are made and how much of the reasoning gets written down. Four axes, and three desks to view them from.
Vibe coding genuinely made shipping a product easier. But what someone without software and systems knowledge ships to production isn't the same as what a senior steering the AI ships. Three levels, three different qualities.
Waterfall, Agile, or Hybrid? That's the wrong question. A decision matrix from 18 years of production experience, three real case studies, and a way out of methodology religion.
A view from 18 years of PHP development — the 2026 state of PHP through W3Techs, Stack Overflow, JetBrains, and Packagist data, including the language's often-ignored weaknesses.
Writing sharpens your thinking and compounds over time. On the career value of being visible — not as personal branding, but as an honest record.
A career post on why mentorship is not a sacrifice but one of the most effective tools for a senior developer's own growth.
On the tension between deep specialization and broad generalism, and how the T-shaped career model resolves that equation.
An honest assessment of how side projects and open source contribute to a career: the returns, the costs, and when archiving a project is the right call.
How to turn a leaving-or-staying decision from an emotional reaction into a measurable evaluation — and distinguish legitimate signals from temporary frustration.
How to manage your learning budget against the constant pressure of new tools and frameworks — a practical approach to deciding what to learn and when.
Looking back at 2014, the year this journal started — what I over-prioritized, what I neglected, and what I would do differently in those early career years.
The title often arrives before genuine seniority does. On why seniority is not about technical knowledge, but about the capacity to make decisions under ambiguity.