Software Design: Tidy First?

Optimise developer productivity and judgement through small yet impactful steps. Essays from experience and research straight to your inbox.

Unlock the Untapped Potential of Your Engineering Team. Master yourself and rid yourself of limiting beliefs. Become the leader worthy of a high performing team. Learn how to build the right things at the right time with proven industry practices

Words about writing, and the world, and the weird and fascinating things in it. Everything's interesting if you give it a good look — so let's go do that.

My regularly scheduled notes

Explain complex systems with simple terms, from the authors of the best-selling system design book series. Get 158 page System Design PDF, FREE

Big Tech and high-growth startups, from the inside. Highly relevant for software engineers and managers, useful for those working in tech.

Writing the software is 90% of the work. The second (harder) 90% is everything else, and that's what we talk about here!

Economics and other interesting stuff

Essays by Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly columnist and author of Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022), What If This Were Enough? (2018), How to Be a Person in the World (2016), and Disaster Preparedness (2011)