Welcome to Notes

This is Notes, a slow and opinionated notebook for the patterns I keep reaching for, the mistakes I keep watching teams repeat, and the stuff I’d otherwise just send people in DMs.

A few loose rules I’m holding myself to:

• Posts come from real engagements. No theory for theory’s sake.
• Short by default. If a thought needs three thousand words it usually needs two thousand more before it ships.
• Strong opinions, loose grip. Anything I write here is what I think today. The post might disagree with itself in eighteen months.

What you can expect

Mostly notes from the four corners I work in:

1. Technical leadership - hiring, scoping, the politics of tech debt, how to be a good first technical hire, and how to be a good third one.
2. AI systems in production - agents, RAG, evaluation, the line between “demo” and “deployable”, and the unglamorous middleware that makes all the difference.
3. Building things that scale - Temporal, Laravel, Postgres at the point where it stops being easy.
4. The polymath edge - what cross-domain experience actually buys you when the problem is “we don’t know what the problem is yet”.

A note on format

You’ll see the occasional code block, which will look like this:

// Cheap, durable, easy to reason about → usually the right call
export async function processPayment(input: PaymentInput) {
  return await temporal.workflow('ProcessPayment', input);
}

And the occasional aside:

The boring technology you understand will outperform the exciting technology you don’t, every time.

Subscribe via the RSS feed, or just check back when you remember.

• Ben