geordee

Products, Platforms, and Protocols

Product Thinking, Product Engineering, Minimum Viable Products… We build products to solve problems. Ship fast, learn faster. The product was the thing, and everything else existed to serve it.

Then someone noticed that every team was solving the same problems. Pipelines, containers, observability, deployment - the same foundations being laid over and over again. So we abstracted downward, and platform engineering emerged. Build the foundation once, let products plant themselves on top. The platform handles the how so product teams can focus on the what.

It’s a good deal, if you accept the terms. Comply with the platform’s architecture, follow...

Single-use Systems

It’s nearly impossible to discuss technology today without AI entering the conversation. And increasingly, it’s becoming just as difficult to talk about software without acknowledging a fundamental shift in how it comes into being. I’ve been observing this shift for a while, watching the patterns take shape as AI tools grow more capable, more accessible, and more deeply woven into our development practices.

The pattern I keep returning to is one we’ve seen play out before, in an entirely different domain.

Manufacturing efficiencies enable mass production. Mass production enables cost efficiencies. Push this far enough, and products become cheaper to...

Measure Once, Cut Twice

The old proverb tells us to measure twice, cut once. It sounds like practical wisdom: be careful, avoid waste, get it right the first time. This article challenges that wisdom, in building products, software or otherwise.

I recently watched a woodworking video by Foureyes Furniture where Chris Salomone dismantles this wisdom. Even when it comes to measurement, he explains, the real skill isn’t in measuring precisely. It’s in sneaking up on the fit. Making incremental cuts, testing against the actual work, adjusting until the piece sits exactly where it should. And once such a setup is complete, it’s all...

Interface Overloading

Recently I had to replace the brake pads on my car. All four of them, and it was quite an expense.

I was cautious driving with the new pads. Partly because the workshop asked me to break them in. And partly because the large expense reminded me to drive carefully without stepping on the brakes unnecessarily. For a while, I observed the brake lights of the cars ahead of me. I became conscious of my speed, when I applied the brakes, how long and how hard.

That’s when I realised something. I have only three primary interfaces to communicate with...

The Strangler Anti-pattern

Martin Fowler saw some strangler figs in Queensland back in 2001. Those remarkable trees became the metaphor for modernising legacy systems - the Strangler Fig Pattern. Wrap new functionality around the old, let the legacy gradually die, and emerge with a modern system.

It’s a common strategy for microservices adoption. But I think we often forget the fig part of strangler fig.

Here’s the thing about strangler figs: when the host tree finally dies and decays, the fig doesn’t collapse. Its roots have grown into a self-supporting columnar structure - an independent organism that no longer needs what it once...

Practical Software Engineering with AI

I have been coding with AI assistance for 3 years, all the way from the beta version of GitHub Copilot. In the past 3 months, Claude Code and Gemini CLI have upped the game with agentic capabilities. Did it improve the speed and experience of software engineering? I had quite mixed results. But after the initial excitement and disillusionment, here is what I found working for the third quarter of 2025. The technology is evolving at a rapid pace - some of these recommendations might be outdated in another 3 months or so. But what’s more important is the spirit...

The Wheel Paradigm

We invented the wheel thousands of years ago. The circular form is mechanically superior to anything nature has produced for locomotion. Yet, wheels are rare in biology; hardly any animals have evolved wheel-like appendages, despite their obvious advantages in efficiency.

Here’s what’s fascinating: we became so committed to the wheel that we reshaped the entire world around it. When our wheeled vehicles couldn’t reach certain terrains, we didn’t abandon wheels. Instead, we built roads, carved tunnels through mountains, and engineered hairpin curves to make the inaccessible accessible. We transformed the environment to suit our superior mechanical solution.

Nature works the...

Technical Credit Score

Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt to describe the trade-offs between engineering costs and short-term business gains. One takes debt only if it justifies a positive return on investment that exceeds the interest cost over time.

Uncle Bob explains how unrealistic or unreasonable choices lead to technical mess, not technical debt. Technical debts are reasonable decisions — they are made deliberately to support business gains, in the face of project constraints that involve cost and time. When these conditions aren’t met, he calls it technical mess rather than debt.

Often, as time passes and with widespread use, the meaning...

Disruptive Innovation Next

Oftentimes, we think innovation is all about new ideas and methods. Of course, innovate comes from “in” (into) and “novus” (new). By extension, we assume that innovation is about creating better products and services. After all, why should we innovate if we are not making things better?

However, in the real world, innovation can also mean creating new markets or networks that did not exist due to various reasons. This is what Clay Christensen describes in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Disruptive innovation does not challenge the leaders directly.

Disruptive innovation does not challenge the leaders directly. Instead,...

Fast Tech

Fast food, fast fashion, and now fast tech.

We had recipes, templates, libraries, and automation. And then exploitation.

We had standardisation, sourcing, scaling, and just-in-time. And then gluttony.

We had expertise, designs, craftsmanship, and research. And then hype.

Speed thrills.