The Staff Engineer Trap: Why the Best ICs Get Promoted Into Misery
She got promoted to Staff, spent 18 months in crisis, and left for a Senior role. The staff engineer trap is real — here's how to avoid it.
She got promoted to Staff, spent 18 months in crisis, and left for a Senior role. The staff engineer trap is real — here's how to avoid it.
200 unit tests passed. The chatbot still hallucinated a dentist's phone number. LLM testing needs evals, LLM-as-judge, and regression for non-determinism.
HashiCorp changed the license, IBM bought them, CDKTF got deprecated. Terraform is becoming the COBOL of infrastructure. Here's what's replacing it.
Our Datadog bill hit $47K/month. OpenTelemetry + LGTM stack replaced it for $1,200. The instrumentation war is over — OTel won.
A missing timeout killed our checkout on Black Friday. Rate limiting, circuit breakers, and backpressure are the three patterns that prevent cascading failures.
Our 15-minute batch ETL caused a billing incident. Debezium reading the Postgres WAL replaced the entire pipeline. CDC setup, consumer patterns, and production gotchas.
A 47-second Postgres query took 120ms on ClickHouse. Columnar storage, vectorized execution, and why your analytics belong in OLAP.
One trillion SQLite databases exist right now. Turso, Litestream, and D1 fixed every limitation. Stop defaulting to Postgres.
Ollama peaks at 41 tok/s. vLLM hits 793. TGI is in maintenance mode. Here's the self-hosting guide I wish existed before I started.
I spent 6 months parsing LLM output with regex. Then Pydantic + structured outputs eliminated every 3 AM parsing alert. Here's the migration.