Philosophy
Notes on building data products that last.
Short essays on the engineering philosophy behind my work — requirements-first design, decoupled architectures, and the discipline of making complex systems legible.
Requirements first, code second: a systems thinker’s habit
Writing the requirements document before writing the code is not bureaucratic overhead — it is the cheapest place to disagree, the cheapest place to be wrong, and the cheapest place to discover the real problem.
Designing for upgrade: why I default to decoupled architectures
Most production systems are not killed by their first design — they are killed by their inability to absorb the second one. Decoupled architectures let individual components be seamlessly upgraded without rewriting the world.