Writing

Notes from running
engineering at scale

On platform modernization, organizational design, AI as infrastructure, and the practices that make engineering results hold rather than decay.

Micro Frontends Only Earn Their Keep at a Certain Size

Micro frontends solve an organizational problem, not a technical one. Below a certain team count they are pure overhead — the threshold is higher than assumed.

How I Interview Engineering Managers

The loop that separates people who can lead engineers from strong engineers who have been given a title. Four signals, and the questions that surface them.

Platform Modernization Without Customer Cost

How sequencing a subtraction release before a framework upgrade let us cut 17% of the codebase and 23% of the app download while holding performance flat.

What Changes as Your Org Nears 100 Engineers

Growing to 90+ engineers changed what leadership meant day to day. The hard part was not hiring — it was building the manager layer between me and the work.

AI as Infrastructure: Removing Localization From the Critical Path

Manual translation quietly gated every market launch. Treating an LLM translation engine as platform infrastructure changed the shape of expansion.

B2B Search Is a Different Problem

Consumer search optimises for discovery. Business buyers already know what they want, buy it repeatedly, and are punished by anything that slows the path.

Performance Is an Org Chart Problem

Performance work that lives in sprints decays between them. A dedicated performance team changed the trajectory in a way sprints never did.

Multi-Locale Is Cheap on Day One and Brutal on Day Nine Hundred

Retrofitting internationalisation costs several times what building for it costs. The decisions that matter are made long before anyone approves a second market.

Incident Review Without the Blame Theatre

Most postmortems are performances of accountability. What matters is one thing: whether the first question is who — or what made it possible.

Choosing React Native for a Commerce App, Honestly

What the framework genuinely delivers at commerce scale, what it costs, and the class of problem that will still consume your senior engineers.

The Analytics Stack Was Never the Hard Part

Instrumenting the funnel took a quarter. Getting decisions to actually change took considerably longer, and that work was not technical.

Building for the Human in the Loop

Assisted sales tooling is the least glamorous surface in a commerce platform, one of the most commercially consequential — and it fails in a predictable way.

Dependency Debt Is a Tax You Pay Without Noticing

Nobody approves it, nobody tracks it, and it quietly sets the price of every upgrade you will ever do. Twenty-two libraries came out; here is what that was worth.

Distributed Squads: Optimise for Handover, Not Overlap

Most advice on distributed teams is about maximising overlapping hours. The organizations that work well do the opposite — they reduce the need for overlap.