Few agencies without a technical lead are able to get by (and none thrive). Relying on contractors can be a double-edged sword: they bring specialized skills but often lack a cohesive vision that aligns technology with your customer’s long-term goals. This disconnect results in software bloat, where unnecessary features and technical debt pile up. The pain is real: without a consistent, forward-thinking approach, your business is at risk of compounding technical debt that will stifle innovation. Don’t let short-term fixes lead to long-term problems. It’s time to rethink how you approach technology, ensuring it supports—not stifles—your growth.

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This is a concept I talked about in my latest conference talk. tl;dr When everyone focuses on solving the user's problem, everyone helps each other and everyone wins.

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Sup fam!! Relationships are everything!! They're the core of your engineering platform. Your team's design docs, software patterns, pull requests, and GitOps workflows all need to pass through a complex network of relationships before becoming meaningful to stakeholders. Before that, they're just bytes sitting on Jeff Bezos' disks. How are your relationships doing? Which relationships need some light touching up? Which ones need some serious investment? How about that one person on that one team? How about on _your_ team? Are you tracking these gaps with the same effectiveness you're tracking tech debt? It takes an intentional effort to build meaningful connections and to show peers you're a stakeholder in _their_ success. It's worth your time -- not to mention you'll feel great!! Want to optimize your engineering platform? Start by investing in your relationships!

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I don't know if I'd go so far as to say LLMs are a dead end, but I agree that software engineering has always been supply side constrained (on the supply of software engineers).

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I've seen clients waste millions on overcomplicated software before partnering with MEV. It can be hard to recognize wasted spending when you're in the middle of a process, too. We had a client who was facing this scenario: • A $2 million system, bloated with features • Complex workflows no one needed • Unfriendly user interface What did they really need? Much simpler requirements. The truth hit hard when we stepped in. We stripped it down. Focused on the essentials. Delivered a solution at a fraction of the cost – just $100,000. The result? A system that did exactly what was needed. Quick, efficient, and without the unnecessary frills. The lesson was clear: Saying "no" to good ideas can be tough. But understanding and focusing on what truly matters saves money, effort, and time.

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If Not React, Then What? Frameworkism isn't delivering. The answer isn't a different tool, it's the courage to do engineering. Code that runs on the server can be fully costed. Code that runs on the client, by contrast, is running on The Devil's Computer. As a result, an unreasonably effective strategy is to send less code. In practice, this means favouring HTML and CSS over JavaScript, as they degrade gracefully and feature higher compression ratios. Declarative forms generate more functional UI per byte sent. These improvements in resilience and reductions in costs are beneficial in compounding ways over a site's lifetime. Stacks based on React, Angular, and other legacy-oriented, desktop-focused JavaScript frameworks generally take the opposite bet. "Our product stack has bet on React and the various mythologies that the cool kids talk about on React-centric podcasts. You're asking us to rethink the whole thing. Which silver bullet should we adopt instead?" JavaScript remains at least 3x more expensive than equivalent HTML and CSS, byte-for-byte. The choice isn't between JavaScript frameworks, it's whether SPA-oriented tools should be entertained at all. For most sites, the answer is clearly "no". Sites built to inform should almost always be built using semantic HTML with optional progressive enhancement as necessary. Sites that have content that changes more frequently should look to "classic" CMSes or tools like WordPress to generate HTML and CSS. Blogs, marketing sites, company home pages, public information sites, and the like should minimise client-side JavaScript payloads to the greatest extent possible. They should never be built using frameworks that are designed to enable SPA architectures. Managers and tech leads that have become wedded to frameworkism often have to work through a series of easily falsified rationales offered by other Over Reactors in service of their chosen ideology. Note, as you read, that none of these protests put the lived user experience front-and-centre. "...it works for Facebook" To a statistical certainty, you aren't making Facebook. Your problems likely look nothing like Facebook's early 2010s problems, and even if they did, following their lead is a terrible idea. "...React is industry-standard" This is, at best, a comforting fiction. At worst, it's a knowing falsity that serves to omit the variability in React-based stacks because, you see, React isn't one thing. It's more of a lifestyle. Across more than 100 consulting engagements, I've never seen two identical React setups. There's nothing standard about any of this. It's all change, all the time, and anyone who tells you differently is not to be trusted. And if you don't mind me asking, how's that "CSS-in-JS" adventure working out? Still writing class components, or did you have a big forced (and partial) migration that's still creating headaches? https://lnkd.in/efB4PR-A

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Yesterday I had a great conversation with a friend and SRE at a very well known tech firm. I asked, "what do you wish you could know about your systems that your tools aren't currently telling you?" and the answer was pretty interesting. He talked about how hard it was to see the cascading effects of rate limiting and traffic shaping policies across a complex microservice application. He described the act of tuning limits and guessing heavily about the downstream side effects that might fix one issue, but impact other services downstream. This resonated with me, as it highlights a growing challenge in our industry. As systems become more distributed and complex, the ripple effects of configuration changes become harder to predict and manage. According to a 2023 Gartner survey, 74% of respondents were using microservice architectures, and 23% were not yet, but planning to adopt a microservices in the future. What’s fascinating about that is that only 39% of respondents thought microservices were completely or mostly successful at being cost effective, or manageable. My friend went on to talk about how tooling is weak in these areas, they aren’t solving the problems of toil around tuning and configuring limits. That’s unfortunate because traffic shaping and rate limiting are not just about protecting your systems from overload; they're about ensuring efficient resource utilization and maintaining service quality. But it seems like home grown solutions are often introducing hidden operational costs and complexities and current tools aren’t providing a holistic view of these interconnected systems. Effective capacity planning in distributed systems requires understanding how applications and limits interact in a living, breathing system, not just the limits of individual components. This turns out to be critical to providing a high quality of service as efficiently as possible. So, I'm curious: What do you wish your systems or tools could tell you that they currently don't? #StanzaSystems #CloudOptimization #EnterpriseIT #PlatformEngineering #SRE

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Fellow code slingers, There is a happy medium between perfect and neglect. Carson G. penned some thoughts on the topic. It's a perfect lunchtime read. https://t.co/WEfeQIBWiI I like big functions and I can not lie. 🍑 #development #code

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When designing microservices, it’s tempting to dive straight into the details—databases, APIs, scaling strategies—but none of that matters if the core structure isn’t sound. That’s where Clean Architecture comes in. I just published an article on Medium exploring how Clean Architecture acts as a blueprint for building microservices that are maintainable, adaptable, and resilient. In the article, I cover: * The Basics of Clean Architecture: A quick look at the principles and why they matter. * Applying it to Microservices: From defining boundaries to layering services for flexibility. * Common Challenges: Finding that sweet spot between structure and over-engineering. If you’re looking for a practical approach to designing systems that can scale and evolve without collapsing under technical debt, this might be worth a read. I’d love to hear how you approach these challenges—what’s worked (or hasn’t) in your experience with microservices? Let’s chat in the comments. #CleanArchitecture #Microservices #SoftwareDevelopment #TechLeadership

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I find Mark's prediction about mid-level software engineers becoming obsolete by 2025, or signals from other companies like Salesforce on total freeze for hiring software engineers, both fascinating and a bit concerning [watch Matthew Berman's commentary - link in the comments]. The biggest challenge I see isn't just job displacement - it's the learning curve. AI is most powerful when you already have the expertise to catch its mistakes. So sure, people who are middle level have already strong foundations to apply their skills elsewhere and redefine their jobs - most likely in amplifying outcomes of the work they've already been doing, now with the use of AI agents. But how do new developers build that foundation if they're immediately relying on AI? It would be like trying to learn a language solely through a translation app. You can fake it only this far. How do we maintain code quality when fewer humans truly understand the systems they're building? The debugging process becomes exponentially more complex. What happens to career progression? If we remove the middle rung of the ladder, how do junior developers gain the expertise needed to become seniors? And how do we ensure AI remains a tool that enhances rather than replaces human understanding and makes us lazy and stupid? For those considering software engineering now, I'd strongly encourage focusing on systems thinking and architectural design - skills that AI still struggles with. Learn to read code critically and understand why certain solutions work (or don't). I think, ultimately the future isn't about competing with AI - it's about mastering the skills AI can't replicate: critical thinking, system design, and problem definition. This has always worked to our advantage across centuries and pivotal moments liek the Industrial Revolution, so I hope it will continue to do so (and the dark scenarios from sci-fi movies about AI taking over won't come true 🤞🏼🫠). PS. I actually explore these themes more deeply in my recent #hankka post "When to use AI, and when to avoid it (and how I use it)" where I share practical strategies for using AI as an amplifier rather than a replacement for human expertise [link in the comments].

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I've been thinking a lot lately about ways of structuring IaC code, specifically - should this code be separate from application's code, or they can (should) be kept close to each other. When writing backend code, my rule of thumb about managing transactions (and other resources, like connections) is that a method or class cannot interfere with its (transaction's) state if that transaction has been started somewhere outside of that code. In simple words, only a piece of code that started a transaction should make a decision to commit or roll it back. Looks like this model can be applied to codifying infrastructure as well. If an application owns the lifecycle of an infrastructure resource, it is okay to put them in one source code repository. Short unpolished writeup on this topic: https://lnkd.in/emzDC9Nn

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NEW: Internal Threads Internal threads allow you to spin up conversations in Slack from Pylon. It's great when you want to start a conversation with someone, but they primarily use Slack (e.g. engineers, product people or anyone who isn't living out of the support system). Common internal threads we are creating at Pylon: 1/ #bugs to report a potential bug 2/ #project channels to ask a team a question about a specific feature 3/ #feedback to report product feedback to the team It's been one of the most game-changing features we've released and we're so excited to share it with everyone. Enjoy!

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💡I need your help! 💡 Appeals Doctor is rebranding prior to launching our new self-managed SAAS product and I need help finalizing our logo. I’d really appreciate your input on which design resonates best with you. 👉 Please take a moment to fill out this quick poll: https://lnkd.in/eAUSttQU Your feedback means a lot, and I can’t wait to hear what you think! At Appeals Doctor, we help Amazon sellers manage their account and listing health, saving them both time and money. From unfreezing funds to reinstating accounts and brands, reopening listings, and fixing suppressed listings, we’ve got sellers covered. #AmazonSellers #Branding #LogoDesign #Startups #Ecommerce #FractionalCTO #AppealsDoctor

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