Engineering

Field guides for building and operating software.

Original, researched guidance on AI products, startup operations, security, payments, infrastructure, and the systems behind dependable digital products.

Engineering5 min read

Building AI-First Products

A practical product-engineering perspective on building useful AI-powered software for people and teams.

Artificial IntelligenceProduct Engineering
Read article
AI Product Engineering6 min read

Build AI Evals Before You Fine-Tune Prompts

A practical system for turning real AI product failures into an evaluation dataset, calibrated graders, regression gates, and production monitoring before prompt tuning.

AI EvalsLLM ProductsProduct EngineeringQuality
Read article
Reliability6 min read

A Backup Is Not Real Until the Restore Has a Clock

A practical restore-testing guide for SaaS teams covering RPO, RTO, databases, object storage, encryption keys, disposable environments, validation, and disaster drills.

BackupsDisaster RecoveryPostgreSQLSaaS Operations
Read article
Reliability6 min read

Every Startup Integration Needs a Degraded Mode

A practical guide to dependency maps, timeouts, bounded retries, circuit breakers, queues, fallbacks, monitoring, kill switches, and provider exit plans.

Third-Party APIsGraceful DegradationReliabilitySystem Design
Read article