Field Notes
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Weekly essays on software architecture, the people around it, and the corporate machine they form together.
Turn the Sequence Diagram on Its Side
The people who can tell you a boundary is wrong were never going to read UML. Turn the sequence diagram on its side and they do not have to.
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We Deleted the Wrong Half of Agile
Reviewability is something you design. Extreme Programming already knew how, and we made exactly the wrong half of it optional.
Design the Stopping Point
Target state is the easy half of a solution design. The hard half is the first step, because that is usually where the money runs out.
Count Your Rejections
A friend passed every round and still did not get the job. Nothing was wrong with him. The company simply had no seat that quarter.
Adoption Is the Deliverable
The ugliest service in production beats the most elegant one nobody calls. So where exactly does an architect's job end?
The Bottleneck Moved
AI made writing code cheap. Our squad reports show where the queue went next: to the people who have to read it.
A Feature Is Not a Service
The ticket said "saved filters". The real decisions were which service, whose identity, and how little to invent.
The Model Is the Easy Part
I put an MCP server in front of a production API. The hard parts were tokens and state, not the model.
Mathematicians vs. Lawyers
Two thinking archetypes I keep meeting in architecture rooms, and why your system needs both.
Pricing the Invisible
Your best architecture work produces nothing observable. Backlogs only rank observables. Let's fix the mismatch.
Multi-Agent Is an Org Chart
I designed a multi-agent AI system and accidentally rebuilt the org chart, failure modes included.
Prompt-Driven Architecture
Part three of the "tools that scale" series: what happens when the daily practice of a Solution Architect starts running on AI.
Probabilistic Metrics
Why the most useful numbers in our AI transformation were never in a database.
From Signals to Blips
How a tech radar became my favorite tool for driving an AI transformation across several hundred developers.
Grinding Dijkstra at Senior Level
Twelve years into my career, there's a repo on my disk where I practice graph traversals like a student. Here's why that's not humiliating.
A Company of One, Staffed by Agents
Four shipping products, one person, and a field report on what AI actually changes about building software.
The Diagram That Cannot Lie
Why I'm building an architecture modeling tool where the diagram is physically incapable of drifting from the code.
Pricing Is Architecture
The pricing page is an architecture diagram wearing marketing clothes.
Anti-Personas: The Users I Refuse to Serve
The most important architecture document in my side project contains no architecture. It's a list of people I will never build for.
Edge Cases Written by Parliament
What integrating with mandatory government systems taught me about specs you cannot refactor.
ADRs for an Audience of One
My hobby project has eleven Architecture Decision Records and zero users. That ratio is correct.
Questions Are an Architect's Sharpest Tool
The artifact of mine that pays off most is not a diagram and not a decision record. It's a list of questions.
The Anti-Corruption Layer Is for People Too
My favorite pattern from Domain-Driven Design protects codebases from foreign models. I keep prescribing it to departments.
The Migration That Never Starts
Every organization has one. Yours does too. It has a folder, a deck, and a birthday.
Diagrams Are Conversations, Not Documentation
The most useful diagram of my career was ugly, partially wrong, and deleted within a week.
Nobody Owns the Sum
Every squad owns its piece. The customer buys the whole. Guess which one has no owner.
Decisions Have an Architecture Too
We design our systems obsessively, then let the decisions about them happen by loudest voice.
Data-Driven Theater
Everyone wants decisions backed by data. Almost nobody asks what the data went through to get there.
Stop Calling It Legacy Code
With AI in the picture, it's not legacy anymore. It's a Knowledge Container.
The Automerger
How we taught our repositories to merge themselves, and what two years of running it taught us.