Engineering
RSSDeep dives and write-ups from real work — cloud and application architecture, and the reasoning behind the decisions.
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Seventy words you need before any other AI writing makes sense — token, context window, embedding, context engineering, tool call, MCP, agent, eval, prompt injection and the rest — each in one sentence with one concrete example, grouped by the thing you are trying to understand.
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Skills, subagents, hooks, MCP, slash commands, plugins, scopes — what each part of an AI coding harness is actually for, organised by who pulls the trigger, and mapped across Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.
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I checked which Claude Code plugins I actually reach for, and found one I was certain I used and never had. What a plugin really is, the integrations that let me find developer-experience gaps instead of guessing at them, why an idle plugin is usually a role mismatch rather than a bad one, and where to start.
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What spec-driven development actually adds when an AI agent writes the code — one feature built three ways with TDD, BDD and SDD, how the three stack, and how to run the loop in Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Spec Kit and Kiro.
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How to let teams own their repositories and pipelines without the platform team becoming a ticket queue — declarative registries, validation that runs first, reconciliation with drift detection, and a lifecycle that includes retirement.
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What it takes to host a self-hosted CI platform properly — two agent tiers, queue-driven scaling, breaking the bootstrap dependency, stopping base-image drift, and making the server disposable.
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A production-safe rollout checklist for infrastructure that cannot be recreated quickly, including retention defaults, staged validation, and manual approval points.
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How to choose between transit routing and direct peering for managed database access, with practical decision criteria and routing guardrails.
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When multi-cloud is worth it (and when it isn't), and how to pick the tool that automates it — a practitioner's take on Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi in 2026.
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A practical CI/CD design for monorepos with multiple infrastructure runtimes, focused on selective pipelines, safer promotion, and clean ownership boundaries.
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How to keep infrastructure stacks generic while all environment-specific values live in validated config files, reducing drift and risky one-off changes.
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The working discipline I've settled on for getting dependable, secure, low-regret results from AI coding assistants — prompting frameworks, model selection, context hygiene, and safety rules, learned the hard way.
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How uv replaces pyenv, venv, pip, pip-tools, pipx, and most of Poetry with a single fast tool — with a quick-start, a migration path, and a replacement cheat sheet.
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A plain-language tour of the two most consequential Python releases in years — free-threading, JIT compilation, subinterpreters, t-strings, deferred annotations, and what to do about them.