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

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.

Blog Posts

19 May 2025

31 March 2025

07 February 2025

07 January 2025

23 December 2024

02 October 2023

26 April 2023

21 March 2023

01 February 2023

14 October 2021

27 May 2021

18 November 2020

23 July 2020

16 May 2019

29 June 2017

01 June 2016

22 June 2015