Craftsmanship
craftsmanship
Behavioral Interviews
Stripe: Rigor and User Focus
Stripe is unusual among high-growth tech companies for the seriousness of its writing culture, the rigor of its decision-making, and the explicit weight given to a 'values' round in the loop. Candidates who walk in expecting a typical Silicon Valley behavioral interview misread it. This lesson defines the cultural posture Stripe actually grades for (users first, rigor, craftsmanship, urgency tempered by careful reasoning, asymmetric upside thinking, optimism), walks through the loop format including the dedicated values interview, maps Stripe's signals to the questions interviewers ask, and shows two model answers tailored to the rigor and user-focus signals Stripe privileges.
Apple: Craftsmanship and Collaboration
Apple does not publish a list of values the way Amazon publishes the Leadership Principles, but Apple's behavioural loop has one of the most consistent cultural signals in big tech: craftsmanship over volume, ownership of the user experience end-to-end, simplicity as a posture, and tight cross-functional collaboration with design and hardware. Apple's interview process is also distinctive in its secrecy: candidates are often interviewed without being told the team or the product they would join. This lesson defines what Apple actually grades for, walks through the loop format and the secrecy constraints, and shows two model answers tailored to the craftsmanship and collaboration signals Apple privileges.
Community
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.
Writing RFCs and Design Docs That People Actually Read
Most design docs are unreadable not because they are too short, but because they answer the wrong question. Here is the structure I now use.
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.
Docker for Devs Who Don't Want to Be Sysadmins
The 80% of Docker that I actually use day to day, the layer-cache rules that cut my image builds from 4 minutes to 30 seconds, and the four mistakes that haunted my first year.
Prompt Engineering Patterns That Survived Six Months of Prod
The five prompting techniques that have actually held up across model upgrades, the four that I tried and dropped, and the eval discipline that lets me tell which is which.
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.
The On-Call Handbook for Engineers Who Hate Being On-Call
The 12 hours before, the first hour of an incident, the playbook discipline that makes 3am pages survivable, and the post-rotation rituals that have stopped on-call from wrecking my health.
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.