Code Organization

AI Coding Assistants: Where They Help and Where They Hurt

Two years of using AI coding assistants daily, the four tasks where they have made me measurably faster, the three places they have actively cost me time, and the workflow I have settled on.

Git Rebase vs Merge: The Team Conversation to Have Once

Why your team needs one git workflow rule, the trade-offs each strategy hides, and the configuration I now ship to every new repo.

Technical Debt: When It's Debt vs When It's Just Old

Most code labeled technical debt is not debt at all. Here is the test I use to tell debt from age, and the rule I follow when paying it down.

Code Review: The Checklist I Wish I'd Had Day One

The five questions I ask on every PR, the comments I have learned not to leave, and the review style that keeps the team shipping without sacrificing quality.

The Refactoring Playbook: Six Moves I Use Weekly

The small, low-risk refactoring moves I reach for every week, what each one fixes, and the order to apply them so the diff stays reviewable.

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform vs Pulumi vs CDK

Three IaC tools I have shipped to production, the trade-offs that actually matter (state, language, drift, blast radius), and the picks I would make today by team shape.

Testing Pyramid vs Trophy: Pick the Right Shape

Most teams ship the testing pyramid by accident. The trophy is what actually matches modern frontend work. Here is how to choose.

CI/CD Pipelines: Stop Letting Them Rot

The maintenance habits that have kept my pipelines fast and trusted for years, the seven categories of rot I have actually seen, and the budget I run so the pipeline is treated as production code.

Feature Flags: Three Patterns I Keep Reusing

The release flag, the kill switch, and the experiment flag. Different lifetimes, different rollback rules, and the cleanup discipline that has stopped my flag system from becoming a graveyard.