The best part of summer, other than the scorching sun, is the joy of being out, a slight breeze on your face, a cold drink in your hand and engaging in the different activities happening. There are always things happening: dance activities, sports in parks, aqua sports and festivals. At any given weekend, there are endless festivals happening concurrently. The sun does bring out the best in people sometimes.
Exciting news! I finally built out my website. Have a look at it here. I finally have a new online home. I am proud of it; it took a while, but it's finally done for now. This also now means more articles coming in once I start dusting off some drafts I have had for a while. It took a long time for a plethora of reasons: I was busy, lazy sometimes, but most of all, I did not know how I wanted it to look or what I wanted it to say. After a couple of tries with evaluating the different sites I liked and reiterating continuously, this is what I chose to have now. Take some time to look through it and wonder!
Why I Build Software Like I’m Going to Maintain It for 10 Years: Instead of optimising for the quick fix for the fastest delivery, we should be treating maintainability as a feature, building for the future you, which leads to building resilient and long-term solutions that are sustainable and are less frustrating. People and technologies change, but having a good design, architecture and documentation makes it easier and cheaper to evolve.
AI is everywhere, but is it really what we read the most? Although AI dominates conversations online, developers prioritise content that helps them solve problems and improve their core technical skills.
Linear is introducing loops that allow teams to automate tasks on the product operations using AI agents. The user describes a task in plain English, and they choose whether it should be scheduled or triggered by an event. The agent gets the context from the workspace to decide actions to take without constant human oversight. The goal is to make AI automation a capability to be shared, audited and transparent for the different teams.
DevOps Engineer, What’s Next? Five Career Paths for the Next Five Years: the traditional DevOps Engineer role is becoming too broad to be sustainable with the increase in favour of specialists. Instead of trying to master everything, we should choose one of the paths below that align with your interests and strengths:
AI Native DevOps: integrating AI agents and intelligent automation into workflows
Platform Engineering: building internal developer platforms and self-service infrastructure
Site Reliability Engineering: reliability, observability and incident management
DevSecOps: embedding security throughout the software workflows and pipelines
Architecture and Engineering Leadership: technical strategy and people management.
The next few years reward engineers who develop deep expertise intently in a specific area. This will give them an edge to move between the paths too since they share common foundations.
How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer: The role of a staff engineer is to recognise high-impact problems before others do. This can be done by listening and being curious about patterns in support requests, issues being raised, and observations. However, not all problems are worth tackling; priority goes to issues with broad organisational impact. Identifying and framing the right problems before writing code is the objective of a staff engineer, because finding the right problem is more valuable than implementing the solution itself.
Lessons Learned After 8.5 Years of ML: Long-term success depends on mindset and habits rather than keeping up with the latest models or research papers. People and collaboration are also at the forefront. Successful projects depend on communication, understanding business problems, and working effectively with engineers, product managers, and stakeholders. At the end of the day, a sustainable ML career is built through consistent practice, practical experience and stronger relationships.
Quality First Agentic Coding: The Night Shift: AI agents should be on night shift to work autonomously on well-defined tasks while developers focus during the day on activities that need human judgement. The workflow depends on comprehensive tests, detailed specifications, strong documentation, and well-maintained codebases, enabling agents to validate their own work and recover from failures. Additionally, there should be review agents that critique changes from different perspectives before a human reviews them. The goal is for humans to provide direction and judgment while AI handles implementation without sacrificing maintainability or reliability.
The word of the day is redress. To redress is to set something right after it has gone wrong.
Example in a sentence:
The bakery offered a refund to redress the delivery of the wrong order.
I am making my grand departure into the unknown.
Take care of yourself!
Until the next fortnight, my treasured reader, go forth, and may the odds be ever in your favour! 👏 🤖 ✊ ☠️ 🏹 🪖
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