This article defines what a platform strategy is or isn't and provides an opinion on how to write one.

Faster, Better, Stronger is not a Strategy

This article argues that working with coding agents turns every software engineer into a QA engineer and into what this new role now entails.

We are QA Engineers now

Joining an on-call rotation might change the future of your career – and maybe you as a person. This article shares my experience being on-call.

Join the on-call roster, it’ll change your life

This article argues for designing software through prototyping and suggest the way you can adjust the shape of your codebase to leverage coding agents to build prototypes faster.

Prototype-First Software Design With Agents

This article describes how following two simple code review rules can make code reviews a great instrument, not a hurdle you have to go through.

Two Simple Rules to Fix Code Reviews

This article explores how justification filler phrases obscure precision in engineering documents and offers clear alternatives.

Justification Filler Phrases

This article explores the relationship between vibe coding and software engineering.

There is no Vibe Engineering

In this article, I share my personal mental model of how LLMs affect software engineers at different levels, and why this leads to both excitement and scepticism.

The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers

In this article, I share my personal mental model for platform teams' sins (anti-patterns), and how you can avoid them.

Six Sins of Platform Teams

This Christmas, let's explore the alphabet of Java annotations. There are so many, but how many of them truly benefit us?

ABC: Learning The Alphabet with Java Annotations

An incident report for the Canva outage on November 12, 2024.

Canva incident report: API Gateway outage

This is a story of my journey learning to build generative ML models from scratch and teaching a computer to create fonts in the process.

Hey, Computer, Make Me a Font

This article discusses how platform engineers can adapt their engineering environment to maximize the potential benefits of large language models (LLMs) in software development.

Platform Engineering in the era of LLMs

This article is the first chapter of a concise field guide for running and supporting JVM applications, focusing on memory. The guide focuses on the most practical aspects of dealing with JVM applications, primarily server-side ones.

Write Predictable software, not Ergonomic

JVM Field Guide: Memory

The Five Whys analysis is a simple root cause investigation technique but can have trade-offs if blindly applied. This article explores the trade-offs of the approach.

The Five Lies Analysis

This post describes how we empowered our millions of users at Canva to collaborate at scale by introducing services that support bidirectional streaming using RSocket.

Enabling real-time collaboration with RSocket

This article explores the trade-offs between the allocate and allocateDirect methods in Java for allocating memory.

Indirect Effects of Allocate Direct

In this article, I explore an anti-hype opinion on service meshes and aim to provide a clearer perspective on whether they are the right solution for specific problems.

You don't need no Service Mesh

This article explores the different ways to obtain the current time in programs and the potential consequences of incorrect usage, as our intuitions and expectations of time from these clocks may lead to misleading results or catastrophic failures.

The matter of time()

The article discusses how Kotlin can create internal languages and how developers can use this feature to write powerful domain-specific languages for manipulating untyped data structures in a typed manner.

Fantastic DSLs and where to find them

This article covers the internals of Project Panama and experiments with increasing Java program performance using a pure inline assembler.

Pure assembly in the forest of Panama

This article explains how to implement a userspace file system using Java, connecting Java and native code without writing C code, to achieve maximum performance.

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