Software Engineering

Learn fd: Find Files Fast with Patterns, Filters, and -x

Learn fd cover: a silhouetted figure sends threads of orange and blue light through a dark tangle of branching folders, under the title "Learn fd"

Learn fd, the fast find alternative: search by name, regex, and glob, filter by type and depth, respect .gitignore, and run commands on results.

Learn Zsh: Globbing, Expansion, Completion, History, and a Command Reference

Learn Zsh cover: a silhouetted figure faces a dark hallway and glowing blue and orange rooms of folders, under the title "Learn Zsh"

Learn zsh fast: glob qualifiers, parameter expansion, arrays, completion, history, options, key bindings, and .zshrc, plus a verified command reference.

Learn Nushell: Tables, Pipelines, Data Files, and a Command Reference

The words Learn Nushell over a silhouetted person lifting one glowing row from orderly streams of blue light while tangled threads fade behind.

Learn Nushell fast: tables and pipelines, JSON, CSV, and TOML files, records, lists, custom commands, and config, plus a searchable command reference.

Learn Tmux: Sessions, Windows, Panes, and a Command Reference

“Learn” in white and “Tmux” in yellow appear above a desk silhouette facing a glowing grid of rooms, connected by a broken thread of light.”

Learn tmux fast: sessions, windows, panes, the prefix key, and .tmux.conf, plus a searchable command reference and curated videos, podcasts, and books.

Why Do I Need an Ontology?

A diagram of an AI agent loop passing through an ontology validator, with valid results flowing forward and invalid results bouncing back.

An ontology gives developers and AI agents a shared, checkable model of the domain, with guardrails that catch error types and plain English mistakes.

What Is Boolean Logic?

A light switch shown in two states, on and off, representing the two values of boolean logic.

Boolean logic explained: true, false, AND, OR, NOT, and the mental patterns a human needs before true or false can mean anything.

Fundamentals of Containerization

Diagram showing a container image built from layers running as isolated processes on a shared host kernel

Containerization fundamentals: images, layers, namespaces, cgroups, and why containers make software portable and reproducible across environments.

Fundamentals of Empirical Software Engineering

Diagram showing questions flowing into data collection, analysis, and validated evidence about how software is built and used.

Empirical software engineering fundamentals: how systematic data collection and analysis replace opinion with evidence about how software is built and used.

Are We There Yet Development

A child in the back of a car whining 'Are we there yet?' as a metaphor for impatient AI-era software delivery.

Are We There Yet Development names the AI-era habit of demanding software at the speed of thought, and the toll it takes.

1000 Life Giving Potions - Operating System Wildlife

A jungle of operating system logos representing a lifetime of jumping between Mac OS, Linux, and Windows.

Why I run Mac OS, Linux, and Windows side by side, what jumping between operating systems taught me, and how to start exploring the OS wildlife yourself.

What Is the Hourglass of Uncertainty?

An hourglass shown at three project phases: full at the start, drained at code-complete, then flipped over after shipping to production so a fresh bulb of sand begins draining through user acceptance testing.

The cone of uncertainty narrows as projects progress. The hourglass of uncertainty says it flips again at launch. Learn which one your project is on.

How Do I Decode Software Deployments?

An architect walking through a service map, on-call rotations, and runbook excerpts to reconstruct the team structure that produced them.

Read deployed software as a fossil record of organizational structure: service boundaries, API contracts, pipelines, and runbooks all carry team imprints.

How Do I Diagnose Software Delivery Friction?

A developer running a git log query in a terminal to rank files by the number of distinct authors who edited them.

Use git history and the org chart to find the modules where Conway's Law is driving merge conflicts, slow reviews, and shipping delays.

How Do I Pitch Org Design for Better Architecture?

An engineer presenting a side-by-side view of a service map and an org chart to a mixed audience of engineers and product leaders.

Use Conway's Law to connect architecture conversations to organizational design, with concrete talking points for architects, leaders, teams, and communities.

How Do I Serve Organizational Needs With Conway's Law?

An engineering leader comparing a commit-frequency heatmap against an org chart to identify ownership mismatches.

Use Conway's Law as a diagnostic to spot healthy vs broken team-to-code alignment, then pick the organizational change that fixes the right problem.

How Do I Smooth Platform Team Friction?

A platform engineer reviewing a queue of pull requests from multiple product teams to identify coordination bottlenecks.

Reduce friction between a platform team and the product teams that depend on it using measurable thresholds and three communication-cost levers.

How Do I Use Conway's Law?

A technical leader picking among five field guides on applying Conway's Law to different organizational situations.

An index of five focused guides on applying Conway's Law: smoothing platform friction, serving the org, diagnosing delivery, decoding software deployments, and pitching a better architectural design.

What Is Conway's Law?

Teams aligned to modules in a codebase, with module boundaries tracing the communication structure between teams.

Conway's Law says software mirrors the organization that built it. Learn the mechanism, the inverse Conway maneuver, and why team shape is architecture.

Fundamentals of Technical Leadership

Diagram showing the technical leadership workflow: credibility, vision, communication, team empowerment, and decision-making in a reinforcing loop.

Learn the fundamentals of technical leadership: credibility, vision, communication, empowerment, and decision-making that turn engineers into leaders.

Fundamentals of Agent Accessibility

Diagram showing the agent accessibility workflow: discoverability, machine-readable interfaces, predictable behavior, and agent-aware error handling.

Agent accessibility fundamentals: make your APIs and software products discoverable, predictable, and usable by AI agents.

Fundamentals of Software Traffic Management

Diagram showing control planes, service meshes, sidecars, and policy-driven routing across distributed services.

Software traffic management fundamentals: control planes, service meshes, sidecars, and routing strategies for resilient distributed systems.

Fundamentals of Software Automation

Diagram showing the automation spectrum from manual tasks through scripted processes to fully automated, self-healing systems.

Software automation fundamentals: core principles, build systems, infrastructure as code, and when automation pays off versus when it creates more problems.

Fundamentals of Concurrency and Parallelism

Diagram showing concurrent tasks interleaving on one core versus parallel tasks running simultaneously on multiple cores.

Concurrency and parallelism explained: why they differ, how threads and async work, and how to reason about race conditions, deadlocks, and synchronization.

Fundamentals of Software Systems Integration

Diagram showing integration patterns connecting multiple systems through APIs, message queues, and data pipelines.

Software systems integration fundamentals: strategies, patterns, and trade-offs for connecting systems that need to work together.