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Career strategy, technical deep-dives, hiring patterns, and honest takes from working engineers. No SEO filler. No course-mill copy.

Recent articles

SHOWING 11 OF 12
ai·9 MIN

RAG isn't a system, it's a 12-stage failure surface

Where retrieval pipelines actually break in production, and the eval harness that catches it before users do.

python·6 MIN

The 2026 Python tooling stack we actually use

uv, ruff, ty, pytest. What replaced everything else, and the migration paths that don't break your CI.

security·11 MIN

Threat modeling for solo founders without a security team

A 90-minute exercise that catches the issues an external audit usually flags first. Templates included.

career·8 MIN

How to read an engineering job ladder before you take the offer

The five questions that tell you whether a "Senior" role is actually senior, or just inflated to fit the comp band.

ai·13 MIN

An eval harness that survives contact with a real user base

How to build LLM evaluation infrastructure that catches regressions before users do — and stays maintained.

hiring·7 MIN

The four interview signals that actually predict performance

After 200+ engineering interviews, these are the only signals that correlate with 6-month performance reviews.

ai·10 MIN

Why your agent demo doesn't survive a real workflow

The five failure modes that kill agent systems after the demo — and the architecture patterns that prevent them.

career·8 MIN

What a portfolio that actually gets interviews looks like in 2026

Not your GitHub commit graph. Not a CRUD app. Here's what hiring managers are actually opening.

ai·9 MIN

When fine-tuning is worth it (and the cheaper alternatives that usually win)

A decision framework for choosing between prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, and full training — with real cost numbers.

engineering·7 MIN

The postmortem template that makes incidents worth the pain

A structured format for turning outages into institutional knowledge — and actually following through on action items.

security·11 MIN

Prompt injection defenses that hold up under adversarial testing

What actually works in production — beyond the naive input-sanitization approaches that break within an hour.

The trail dispatch · weekly

One letter every Sunday. Nothing else.

The week's best writing on AI, careers, and the craft — curated by working engineers. No drip campaigns, no sponsored anything.

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