Writing

Essays on software, systems, and how teams build them — 2013 to 2023.

Internet as a File System Tracing the web’s read–write dream from WebDAV to IPFS, and the missing layer underneath it. 2023 Evolution of Microservices How we got from the monolith to the mesh — and what each step actually bought us. 2022 Why you should be making monolith? A contrarian’s case for building a monolith before reaching for microservices. 2021 Implementing SL{A, I, O}s On service levels — what to measure, what to promise, and what to do when you miss. 2021 Tech Lead What a Tech Lead actually is, where the role’s boundaries lie, and what it demands. 2021 Startup Maturity Model A model for reading the stage a startup is really at, beneath the apparent chaos. 2021 Going Faster Why speed matters in technology businesses, and how the way you move has to change. 2021 CTO Maturity Model The altitudes a technology leader operates at, and how the role matures with the company. 2020 Gojek: Signing Out Closing the chapter on five years at Gojek. 2020 Building Economy of Scalable Engineering What it takes to build engineering that scales with the business, not against it. 2020 My User Manual A user manual for working with me. 2020 Art of Writing Rcas Incident write-ups as a craft — the patterns worth improving across a company. 2020 How Kafka Solved a Culture Problem at GOJEK How the right architecture dissolved an organisational problem at Gojek. 2019 What does’t work initially only makes you stronger — Team Lambda Part two of the Team Lambda story. 2018 Team Focused on Eventually Automating Everything Untying dependencies and letting machines do the work. 2018 From subjective interviews to binary hires - a story Re-engineering the interview into something more defensible. 2018 the vicious circle A short story about a boy named Johnny. 2014 Digital Ocean secretly wants you to switch to larger droplets ? A close read of a cloud provider’s incentives. 2014 Hello World ! Where it started. 2013