Thinking, worked out in public.
Essays on software architecture, systems thinking, AI, engineering leadership, and the work of building products. Frameworks I actually use, and opinions I am willing to defend.
Long-form and infrequent. New writing goes out through Designing Modern Systems on Substack; this page is where it is indexed.
Latest from Designing Modern Systems
Recent posts from the newsletter. Each one opens on Substack, where it is published.
Most .NET Starter Kits Optimize for CRUD (opens in a new tab)
Production failures don’t. Most starter templates are optimized for scaffolding. CRUD endpoints. And that’s fine — for a demo. But production systems don’t fail because CRUD is slow. They fail because decisions were unclear.
Stop Using Claude Like a Chatbot (opens in a new tab)
Most engineers are underutilizing AI. Not because they don’t know how to prompt. But because they’re treating it like a conversational tool instead of infrastructure.
Code Reviews Don’t Fail Because of Skill (opens in a new tab)
They Fail Because of Intent — Most code reviews don’t break down because someone lacks technical ability. They break down because no one defined the purpose of the review.
Essays
Longer pieces written for this site. These live here rather than in the newsletter, and most of them started as a decision on a real system — the ones with a write-up are on Projects.
- Architecture 1
- AI 1
- Leadership 1
- Systems Thinking 0
The architect's job is decisions, not diagrams
Every architecture diagram I have ever drawn was a byproduct. The actual work was deciding what we would not build, and writing down why.
Architecture · · 4 min read
How to tell if your AI strategy is real
Most AI strategies are procurement plans wearing a strategy costume. Four questions separate the ones that will compound from the ones that will quietly be cancelled.
AI
· 4 minMost scaling problems begin as communication problems
The system is a cast of the organization that built it. When a platform stops scaling, the constraint is usually an ownership boundary nobody wanted to renegotiate.
Leadership
· 4 min
Designing Modern Systems
Essays on architecture, engineering leadership, AI, and building better systems. No promotions, no cadence for its own sake.
If a piece here describes a problem you are actually living with, that is what the consulting work is for.