The AI Act's high-risk obligations take effect today
Two years after entry into force, the substantive requirements arrive. What changes, what was delayed, and what to do now.
latest · issue 200 · August 3, 2026
Two hundred pieces in
What writing in public taught me about engineering, what I was most wrong about, and why the archive is the point.
Two years of agentic coding: what stuck
The workflows that survived contact with real work, the ones that did not, and what the whole thing actually changed.
Deleting code is the highest-value work nobody schedules
Every line you remove is one that cannot break, cannot be misread, and does not need to be maintained.
The performance budget
A number, agreed in advance, that fails the build. The only mechanism that has ever kept a system fast.
What I look for in a codebase in the first hour
A checklist for assessing an unfamiliar codebase quickly — for a job, a due diligence, or a project you inherited.
The unreasonable effectiveness of a changelog
A file that takes ten minutes per release and answers most of the questions your users would otherwise ask you.
Property-based testing deserves its moment
State an invariant, let the machine find the counterexample. A twenty-year-old technique that fits this moment exactly.
Vendor lock-in: an honest cost model
Portability is not free and neither is dependence. A framework for deciding how much abstraction to buy.
Connection pooling, explained properly
Why your database has 400 connections, why that is bad, and how to size a pool without guessing.
The onboarding document that actually works
Most onboarding docs are written by people who already know. Here is what a new engineer needs on day one, in order.
Why your container image is 1.4 gigabytes
It should be forty megabytes. Here is where the rest of it came from and how to get it back.
Secrets management, practically
Not a survey of vaults. The specific practices that actually reduce risk, in order of what to do first.
Code review comments that change things
Most review comments are noise or nitpicks. A small taxonomy of the ones that are worth writing.
Backpressure is the concept your system is missing
When a fast producer meets a slow consumer, something has to give. Deciding what, in advance, is the whole discipline.
The crawler tolls, one year on
Default blocking and pay-per-crawl changed who can read the web. An assessment of what actually happened.
Cross-platform is a promise you make to your budget
Write once, run anywhere, debug everywhere. The honest accounting of what each approach actually costs.
Retries: a complete guide to not making it worse
The most common way a small incident becomes a large one is a retry policy written without thinking about aggregate behavior.
Half of 2026, in one page
Six months of regulation, agent tooling that mostly did not fix the bottleneck, and a web platform that quietly finished.
Configuration is the most under-designed part of your system
It has no type system, no tests, no review, and it causes a disproportionate share of outages.
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