AI & Agents — Reading Order
A curated path through 30 essential posts — focused on agentic software development, the protocols reshaping how agents work, and what it takes to ship AI in production. Skip the noise, read what matters.
Imrul Sheikh
Engineering Leadership — Reading Order
A structured path through 30 posts — from hiring your first engineer to running a P&L. Built for new EMs, senior ICs considering management, and experienced leaders filling gaps.
System Design & Infrastructure — Reading Order
A structured path through 20 posts — from algorithmic building blocks through distributed systems to production reliability. Built for backend engineers, platform engineers, and anyone preparing for system design interviews.
What Skills a Platform Team Actually Needs
The skill surface of platform engineering is too wide for any team to cover well by treating everyone as a generalist. The teams that deliver build deliberate specialisation with overlapping breadth.
Team Topologies for Platform Teams
Team Topologies is not an org chart pattern — it is a cognitive load management strategy with architecture as a side effect. Design teams to produce the architecture you want, not the other way around.
Platform Engineering Foundations
An industry primer on platform engineering, covering organisational vocabulary (Team Topologies, Platform-as-a-Product, paved roads, SRE) and the technical building blocks of a modern Internal Developer Platform.
Platform as a Product
Delivery teams are your customers. The moment you stop treating them as a captive audience and start competing for their adoption, your platform becomes something engineers choose rather than endure.
Internal Developer Platforms
An IDP is an opinionated, product-managed abstraction layer that converts developer intent into provisioned, policy-compliant cloud infrastructure — without the developer needing to understand Kubernetes, Terraform, or security policy.
Golden Paths and Paved Roads
A golden path is not a mandate — it is the best available answer to a question most teams will eventually ask, shipped before they get lost. The difference between a paved road and a mandate is who bears the cost.
Developer Experience and DX Metrics
Developer experience is not a soft concern — it is the measurable output of a platform team. DORA proved the causal link between delivery throughput and organisational performance.