Founding Editor
Engineering leader and technical architect focused on building scalable systems, developer platforms, and high-performing engineering teams. Writes about software architecture, AI engineering, and the craft of building great technology.
Keyword search can only find what's literally there. When users search for 'laptop bag' and your documents say 'notebook carrying case,' regex won't help. Vector search understands meaning — and MongoDB Atlas supports it natively.
Generating embeddings is the easy part. Keeping them in sync as your data changes — at scale, without downtime — is where the real engineering lives. Here's how to build the full pipeline on MongoDB Atlas.
Most scaling advice is generic. Here are the patterns that have consistently worked across real systems handling millions of requests — and the ones that sound good but fail in practice.
Oil above $100, the Strait of Hormuz closed, helium supplies collapsing, data center costs surging. The US strikes on Iran aren't just a geopolitical event — they're a supply chain and infrastructure shock that will ripple through the tech industry for years.
AI engineering isn't just software engineering with a model attached. The feedback loops, failure modes, and quality signals are fundamentally different. Here's how to think about it.
The choice between Postgres and MongoDB isn't about which is 'better.' It's about understanding the access patterns, consistency requirements, and operational constraints of your system.
SOLID is the most cited and least understood set of principles in software engineering. Most explanations stop at the acronym. Here's what each principle actually means for your codebase — and when to break them.
Large contexts, MAX mode, Opus 4.6 Thinking — the most powerful AI coding tools are also the most expensive. After a brutal invoice, I figured out how to get 90% of the performance at 20% of the cost.
AI made production fast and almost free. Anyone can build an app, generate content, ship a product. The scarce resource is no longer execution — it's the idea worth executing. The most creative person in the room just became the most dangerous.
Writing code line by line is no longer the job. The job is conducting agents — knowing what to build, how to decompose it, and how to steer AI toward the right solution. The skill that matters now is engineering judgment, not typing speed.