Writing
AI-assisted delivery, engineering leadership, and web performance — from work, not theory.
Latest
The Delivery Pipeline I Run: Tickets In, Reviewed Pull Requests Out
An agentic pipeline that reads the ticket, reads the design, implements, and runs its own QA — and the human approval gate that never moves.
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Reviewing for Nine Senior Engineers
When everyone on the team is senior, review stops being about catching mistakes — and becomes the mechanism that keeps nine strong engineers building one system.
LeadershipCode review2 min - 09
AI Can't Hold Your Codebase in Its Head
The real failure mode of AI-assisted development is locally correct code that's globally wrong — and the review posture that catches it.
AICode review2 min - 08
We Don't Say No to Features. We Say No to Free Scope.
The useful boundary isn't refusing work — it's refusing to pretend new work is free. Defend the estimate, not the answer.
Leadershipdelivery2 min - 07
Standards That Survive a Deadline
Most team standards are suspended the week before a release. The ones that hold aren't the most believed-in — they're the ones that are impossible to skip.
LeadershipBest practices2 min - 06
What I Never Put Into an AI Tool
One absolute rule about what leaves the building — and why the constraint improved the work instead of limiting it.
AIBest practices2 min - 05
How This Site Loads in Under One Second (and How You Can Verify It Right Now)
An annotated walkthrough of this exact page's load — the budget it was built to, the requests it makes, the things it deliberately refuses to ship, and how to check every claim yourself in DevTools.
PerformanceNext.js4 min - 04
INP Is a React Problem (and React Has the Tools to Fix It)
Interaction to Next Paint punishes exactly the thing React does by design: large synchronous renders on the main thread. Where the milliseconds go, how to see them in a trace, and the fix ladder from memoization to useTransition to leaving React out of it.
Performancereact4 min - 03
Your Next.js Bundle Is Lying to You: A Field Guide to Finding the Real Bloat
How to read Next.js build output correctly, catch barrel-file explosions and 'use client' contagion, and set up CI guardrails — illustrated with the real numbers from cutting this site from 173 kB to 105 kB of first-load JavaScript.
PerformanceNext.js4 min - 02
Reading a Waterfall Like a Performance Engineer
The network waterfall is the most information-dense chart in web development, and almost nobody teaches how to read it. The vocabulary, the six shapes of a broken waterfall, and how to trace the critical path to LCP.
PerformanceDevTools4 min - 01
Web Fonts Without the Performance Tax: Compression, Subsetting, and Fallbacks That Don't Shift
A practical deep dive into font performance: why woff2 wins, how subsetting cuts 80% of the bytes, what variable fonts change, and how size-adjust makes the fallback invisible — with this site's own font pipeline as the worked example.
Performancefonts4 min