The Case Against the Big Rewrite Let me paint a picture you’ve probably seen before: it’s 2 AM on a Tuesday, your production system is down, and somewhere in a Slack channel, someone’s typing “…should we just rewrite it all?” This is the moment where many engineering teams make a choice that haunts them for years. The big bang rewrite. It sounds appealing—clean slate, new tech stack, lessons learned applied from day one....

Every few years, a deployment strategy comes along that promises to solve all your problems. Remember when everyone said containers would fix everything? Blue-green deployment is this decade’s darling—the deployment equivalent of “have you tried turning it off and on again,” except way more expensive. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to trash-talk blue-green deployments. They’re genuinely useful in certain scenarios. But I’ve watched too many teams implement them as a band-aid, a way to avoid addressing the real issues lurking in their architecture....

The Tech Lead’s Paradox: How to Stay Technical While Leading You got the promotion. Congratulations! You’re now a tech lead. Your title reads better on LinkedIn, your salary bumped up, and suddenly everyone’s looking at you for “technical direction.” Then—about three weeks in—you realize you’re drowning in meetings. Stand-ups, syncs, architecture reviews, stakeholder updates, planning sessions, and something called “alignment meetings” that nobody can quite define. Between 9 AM and noon, you’ve attended four video calls and written zero lines of code....

The Problem Nobody Wants to Admit Your threat model sits in a Confluence page, beautifully diagrammed, meticulously documented. It’s a masterpiece of security theater. Your developers glance at it during onboarding, security checks it off a compliance box, and then everyone pretends it actually represents reality. Sound familiar? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most threat models are elaborate fiction—carefully crafted stories about how systems should be attacked, divorced from how they actually evolve in production....

When you’re a solo developer, your infrastructure isn’t just your business—it is your business. There’s no ops team to call at 3 AM, no heroic incident response meeting where someone else takes charge. It’s just you, your cold coffee, and the sinking realization that your production database just became nothing more than a digital ghost story. I’ve been there. And I’m guessing you have too, or you’re smart enough to know it’s coming....