Architecture
Breaking production on purpose
Chaos engineering has the most lurid name in software and the most conservative temperament. If recovery is a capability, this is how you find out whether you actually own one.
Articles
Architecture
Answering questions with MCP
This site now answers questions over MCP through a tool called `ask_matt`. It quotes from published articles, hands over the hand-kept numbers when a question wants one, cites everything, and refuses the rest. The refusal took the most design effort.
Architecture
The anatomy of a resilient system
Servers fail every day. Whether that becomes an outage depends far more on the organisation than the infrastructure.
Architecture
The traceability problem
Most engineering systems are built to answer what happened. The harder question, the one that surfaces at the worst possible moment, is who changed what, when, why, and whether they should have.
Engineering Leadership
Interviewing engineers in the age of AI
When every candidate has a world-class assistant in the next tab, the interview stops measuring memory and starts measuring judgement. Most processes haven't noticed yet.
The machine room
- Building a double-entry ledger in 200 linesComputer Science · 8 min read
- JavaScript security essentials: the pitfalls that still break productionJavaScript · 17 min read
- Why React re-renders: understanding the Fiber work loopJavaScript · 4 min read
- Most JavaScript performance problems aren't JavaScript problemsJavaScript · 5 min read
- Why JavaScript performance is weirdJavaScript · 10 min read
- The event loop is not what you thinkJavaScript · 4 min read
Engineering Leadership
Don't let AI borrow your brain
The danger of AI isn't that it makes engineers less productive. It's that it quietly removes the exercise that kept them sharp in the first place.
Engineering Leadership
DORA metrics are not performance metrics
Lead time, deployment frequency and change failure rate tell us a great deal about delivery systems. They tell us surprisingly little about the performance of individual engineers.
Engineering Leadership
AI doesn't change Conway's law
Every technology generation promises to transform how software gets delivered. Most of them eventually rediscover that organisational structure shapes the outcome far more than the tools the engineers happen to be holding.
The blueprint room
- Design number 2: Two million games, one running clockPlate two: two players sharing one truth while the clock runs, and why the bravest thing a real-time system can do is stop.
- Design number 1: Designing a URL shortener for its worst dayResilience is a design input, not a deep dive at the end. The first in a series: the smallest system everyone knows, designed around the question of what is allowed to die.
Platform Engineering
Golden paths and engineering governance
The most effective governance models don't rely on approval boards, process documents or compliance checklists. They make the right thing the easiest thing, and then mostly get out of the way.
Architecture
Your AI doesn't need another API, it needs a toolbox
Why Model Context Protocol matters less because of the protocol itself and more because it solves a problem every engineering organisation eventually encounters.
Engineering Leadership
What AI adoption actually looks like inside a 300+ engineer organisation
The hardest part of AI adoption isn't choosing tools. It's changing how engineers, leaders and organisations work around them.
Payments
Moving money is hard
Most software engineers think a payment is a database transaction. The payments industry has spent decades proving otherwise.
Security
Secrets are everywhere
Year after year the breach reports tell the same story: not sophisticated attackers, just credentials sitting somewhere they shouldn't.
Engineering Leadership
Why most technical debt is really organisational debt
Code rarely becomes hard to maintain because engineers wanted it that way. More often the architecture is just a faithful record of the incentives, constraints and decisions of the organisation around it.
Platform Engineering
Building a desktop platform is like building an operating system
Most engineers think desktop platforms are about windows and toolbars. The hard parts are identity, communication, deployment, versioning and convincing hundreds of applications to coexist without setting fire to each other.
Architecture
Caching is easy until it isn't
Most caching strategies look brilliant during architecture reviews and become considerably less impressive the first time stale data reaches production.
New writing, now and then
Occasional notes on platform engineering, building dependable software and that constant buzz word we doom scroll past on LinkedIn! No cadence promised.