Notes

Enduring principles on building reliable systems, effective teams and sustainable delivery. Written to be useful regardless of stack or sector.

• API Governance Principles

  Contract-first design, versioning as a promise, and why rate limits belong in your docs.

• Engineering Leadership Principles

  Autonomy with guardrails, decisions at the right altitude, and boring technology in production.

• An Infrastructure Maturity Model

  From monolith to platform thinking — and how to know where you are on the arc.

Formative reading

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications

  Martin Kleppmann

  The clearest treatment of distributed-systems trade-offs.

• Building Microservices

  Sam Newman

  Bounded contexts and service decoupling — how to avoid premature extraction.

• The Manager’s Path

  Camille Fournier

  Essential for the IC-to-manager transition and honest engineering ladders.

• An Elegant Puzzle

  Will Larson

  Systems thinking for engineering organisations and team topology.