Backends in Node.js and TypeScript This is a well‑known quote in the SWE world, originally said by an engineer at Netscape over 20 years ago: “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” : So, the issu...

I keep reading that AI turns an engineer into a reviewer of generated code and removes the enjoyable part of the work. My experience with Codex is quite opposite will try Claude one day. I have always enjoyed software engineering, and now I enjoy it ...

The article linked herehttps://calnewport.com/on-ai-coding-and-its-discontents/ describes a telling case: a senior developer discovers that Claude Code reduced the time needed to complete a task from a week to just two days. However, later on, the ge...

There is a popular idea that refactoring is making code shorter. It is not entirely wrong. Repetition, pointless conditional branches, and dead variables do make code longer for no reason. But the usual topmost problems are when the intentions of a c...

The hardest part of idempotency is often not the retry. It is deciding when two attempts represent the same business operation. Sometimes the identity is a request ID or external message ID. Sometimes it is a business key or a state transition that ...

10× Faster Development with AI prototypes. A prototype generated by a non-technical stakeholder can be very useful, but I do not treat it as an unfinished production system. I treat it as an executable requirements draft. The prototype gives stak...

Understand the existing design, then isolate the change, design it cleanly, and implement it with TDD, ATDD and integration testing. Legacy systems usually do not need to be rewritten entirely. More often, a few parts create most of the pain, while...

Software quality is often discussed as if it were mainly an engineering preference: developers want cleaner code, more tests, better architecture and additional time before releasing. From the business side, this may look like a conflict between qual...

The 2023 skill erosion argument was easier to dismiss as an old automation story. In 2026 it is harder to dismiss. The point is not that AI makes people stupid. The point is that AI makes it very easy to skip the part where competence is actually fo...

Juniors In reaction to the often-heard complaint that the SWE profession would suffer the absence of junior engineers due to AI + seniors doing all the work, I recently was thinking the following. This is not going to happen, because there will al...

A lot of people say the new skill is writing better specs. I agree, but I think there is a trap here. A good spec is not just a more detailed prompt. It comes from understanding the domain AND software engineering well enough to know what should not ...

Forward-Deployed Engineers recently became the new hot role across big AI companies. The FDE feels more like an old enterprise software consultancy coming back again. In a nutshell it is field engineering, consulting, systems integration, domain ana...

Most product changes do not enter a company as clean technical tasks. They arrive as rough business intent. A customer is confused. A workflow feels slow. A new case must be supported. Some manual operation should be automated. Someone says: "can we...

One of the loudest claims around AI coding tools is that one developer can now do the work of a whole team. Ship features in hours. Replace weeks with prompts. Move 10x faster. Well, maybe. But only if you pretend that software development is mostly...

I bumped into the claim somewhere on LinkedIn and that got me thinking why some people may think so while others consider this a huge overstatement. As I often see, such contradictions emerge because people judge microservices from very different imp...

AI storm has revealed an opinion that in AI-accelerated product teams, traditional "source of truth" artifacts like Figma, design documents, software models become obsolete because products evolve too quickly, with codebase modified directly and iter...

AI is not one tool. That is the ubiquitous judgment mistake across posts in social networks. AI is a set of very different capabilities, and treating them as one thing is where most confusion starts. Some parts are genuinely useful in engineering. S...

This is the teaser post of the original1 review that is pretty detailed, containing images and diagrams. Beck K., Extreme Programming Explained 1999 Extract The book is only 1/5 about programming and 4/5 about organizational matters. The book cove...

In software engineering, work is almost never purely mechanical. The hard part isn’t typing code, it’s discovering constraints, modeling the domain, defining contracts, and making irreversible decisions explicit. When that work is done, TDD / codin...

The AI publicity landscape is full of either bought or excited adopters' promotion, with a very small part of experienced engineers feedback. As very fairly noted on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7391379938538311680?up...