Blog · tag
expert-generalist
4 posts
On 'Expert Generalist' — an influence on how I describe my work
14 min readWhy 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.
Learn the domain before you design the abstraction
10 min readPattern-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
10 min readTwenty-five years and nine production languages later, the frameworks have all turned over. The patterns underneath are what made the work cumulative.
Why I stay 20–30% in the editor as a principal engineer
10 min readTwenty-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.