
Designing Rollback Strategies So You Stop Fearing Deployments
Let’s be honest: deployments are scary. That moment when you hit the merge button and your code goes live is basically a controlled form of organized panic. Your heart rate spikes. Your Slack notifications go silent. Someone refreshes the monitoring dashboard for the hundredth time. And then—nothing happens. Everything works. You survived another deployment. But what if it didn’t work? For years, I watched teams treat deployments like defusing a bomb....

The Most Dangerous Phrase in Engineering: "We've Always Done It This Way"
The phrase sits in your codebase like a time bomb with a burnt-out LED timer. Nobody remembers who installed it, why it’s there, or when it became “the way things are done.” But there it is—legacy patterns, architectural decisions, and processes that have calcified into absolute truth simply through the passage of time and institutional inertia. The most dangerous phrase in engineering isn’t a syntax error or a null pointer exception....

Designing a Modular Monolith Architecture That Survives Microservice Hype in 2026
If you’ve been scrolling through tech Twitter lately, you’ve probably encountered the modern engineer’s equivalent of a religious war: microservices versus monoliths. One camp insists that monoliths are dinosaurs headed for extinction. The other swears by the simplicity of a single codebase. Meanwhile, neither side is talking about the architecture that’s quietly winning in production environments across the industry: the modular monolith. Here’s the thing about hype cycles: they’re excellent at obscuring practical truth....

Why You Should Delete Half Your Jira Tickets Right Now
There’s a metaphorical graveyard living in your Jira instance right now. Somewhere between the “In Progress” column and the depths of your backlog, there’s probably a ticket created three years ago about “Investigate potential performance improvements” that nobody’s looked at since the Great Refactoring of 2023. Maybe there are fifty like it. Maybe there are five hundred. I’m going to make a controversial statement, and I’m ready for the angry comments: you should probably delete most of them....

Tiny Automation Scripts That Save Weeks of Work Per Year
Remember that mundane task you did yesterday? The one that took fifteen minutes and made you want to scream into the void? What if I told you that a five-minute script could eliminate it forever? Not metaphorically—literally every single day for the rest of your life. The beautiful irony of automation is that we often spend more time complaining about repetitive tasks than it would take to automate them. But here’s the thing: the payoff isn’t just about reclaiming those fifteen minutes today....