I’ve been in too many meetings where someone says, “Wait, why did we build it that way?” only to discover the answer was buried in a 47-page RFC from 2019 that nobody ever opened. Sound familiar? The irony is that Request for Comments documents are supposed to prevent this chaos. Instead, many teams produce RFCs that get skimmed, misunderstood, or worse—completely ignored. But here’s the thing: a well-crafted RFC is like a good movie....
I’ve been in enough architecture meetings to know what happens when someone mentions the CAP Theorem: the room gets quiet, heads nod knowingly, and suddenly everyone’s discussing partition tolerance like they’re planning for nuclear fallout. Here’s the thing—they’re probably wrong to worry this much. Don’t get me wrong. The CAP Theorem is a legitimate, important concept in distributed systems. But it’s also become the technical equivalent of a sports car in a suburban driveway: impressive to have, rarely driven at full capacity, and occasionally used to justify questionable decisions at 2 AM during a crisis meeting....
Remember those days when QA engineers would spend half their time manually crafting test data? You know, the excruciating process of copying production data, anonymizing it (badly), and hoping no one notices that your test database contains John Smith’s entire purchase history? Yeah, those days are numbered. AI-powered test data generation is quietly revolutionizing how we approach testing, and frankly, it’s about time. The reality is sobering: manual test data creation consumes up to 50% of testers’ time, and relying on production data is a compliance nightmare waiting to happen....
Every software company has that person. You know the one. They finish tickets in a day that would take normal developers a week. They know the codebase like the back of their hand. They can debug production incidents that confound entire teams. Management treats them like a unicorn. The engineers avoid sitting next to them because they make everyone else look bad. And deep down, you’re wondering: am I not cut out for this?...
There’s a moment every engineer dreads—that 3 AM alert when something critical goes down, and suddenly your team is in full firefighting mode. The real question isn’t if systems will fail (they will), but how quickly you can get them back online. That’s where Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) comes in, and it’s honestly one of the most underrated metrics in engineering. Not because it’s complex, but because most teams measure it wrong or worse—not at all....