Blog

Writing on platform engineering, regulated systems, AI, and the patterns that travel between them.

On 'Expert Generalist' — an influence on how I describe my work
14 May 202614 min read
Why I describe myself as an Expert Generalist, what Fowler, Joshi and Venkatraman's framework actually says, and the six traits anchored in twenty-five years of career stories.
Compliance and continuous delivery aren't in tension
12 May 202610 min read
A decade under ISO 13485, IEC 62304, MDSAP, GDPR and HIPAA taught me the standards don't forbid daily releases — they forbid undocumented, unrepeatable change.
DSLs that give domain experts ownership
12 May 202610 min read
The highest-leverage work of my career has been designing small declarative languages that let domain specialists own their own rules.
Learn the domain before you design the abstraction
12 May 202610 min read
Pattern-driven architecture only works when you've internalised the domain first. Three career moments where the abstraction got better only after the domain understanding did.
Patterns travel, frameworks don't
12 May 202610 min read
Twenty-five years and nine production languages later, the frameworks have all turned over. The patterns underneath are what made the work cumulative.
Reconciliation loops everywhere: GitOps, controllers, agentic feedback
12 May 202610 min read
Once you see the reconciliation loop — desired state, observed state, corrective action — you find it under operators, GitOps, and now agentic coding.
The Hypervelocity bet: agentic coding at platform scale
12 May 202611 min read
Agentic coding only pays off if the platform underneath it changes — contracts, telemetry, review, cost attribution. The keystroke is the easy part.
Why I stay 20–30% in the editor as a principal engineer
12 May 202610 min read
Twenty-five years in, I still spend a fifth to a third of every week writing production code. Here is why, and what it actually looks like in a calendar.