Writing

Selected writing and talks on software architecture, production systems, and technical leadership.

Writing

• Push to Prod — Newsletter, ongoing. Battle-tested insights from building critical systems at Netflix, Twitter, and Comcast — edge routing, personalization infrastructure, and analytics serving millions in production.
• Push to Prod or Die Trying: High-Scale Systems, Production Incidents, and Big Tech Chaos — Book, 2025 early access. A practical guide to building and operating large scale software systems, informed by lessons learned from working at Netflix, Twitter, and Comcast.
• What is Good Software Architecture? — Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter, 2025. Exploring architecture as explicit trades as opposed to the overly cerebral concept of “tradeoffs.” Also discusses characteristics of good and bad software architecture.
• Outages Are Coming For You — LeadDev, 2021. Why outages are inevitable and how to prepare your team and systems to handle them gracefully.

Talks

• Putting Power into Practice as a Staff+ Engineer — LeadDev West Coast Conference, October 2023. How Staff+ engineers can leverage their influence and expertise to drive meaningful change across an organization.
• Concurrency War Stories — Internal talk, April 2021. Real-world tales of concurrency bugs, race conditions, and the hard lessons learned debugging them.
• Risky Business: Taking Risks in Production — LeadDev Live Conference, April 2020. A framework for thinking about risk in production systems and making informed decisions about when to take them.