Articles
Worth reading
A short take on pieces worth your time — architecture, AI, system design, and engineering careers — each one linked back to its original source.
42 articles
What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? Role, Skills, Salary & Career Roadmap
Forward-deployed engineering — embedding directly with a customer to scope, build, and ship production software inside their environment, part engineer and part consultant — has become one of tech's fastest-growing, highest-leverage roles. This piece lays out what the job actually involves day to day, the "T-shaped" skill profile it rewards (deep in one area, broad everywhere else, strong with people), and a realistic preparation path if you're coming from a standard engineering background.
What Is RAG? How Retrieval-Augmented Generation Works
A clear, current walkthrough of retrieval-augmented generation: why it exists (grounding an LLM in your own data instead of relying on what it memorized during training), how the retrieval-then-generate pipeline actually works, and where teams run into trouble in practice — the retrieval step, not the model, is almost always the real failure point. Useful if you're deciding whether RAG is the right pattern for a project, or just want a precise mental model instead of the marketing version.
Netflix Tackles Data Deletion at Scale with Centralized Platform Architecture
InfoQ's coverage of a QCon talk on a problem almost nobody designs for up front: how do you actually delete data, correctly and completely, across dozens of heterogeneous storage systems, at a scale where 76.8 billion row deletions across 1,300 datasets is a normal workload? Netflix's centralized deletion platform is a reminder that "delete" is a distributed systems problem with its own consistency and observability requirements, not an afterthought bolted onto each service. Especially relevant if you're anywhere near GDPR or CCPA compliance work and have been treating deletion as someone else's problem.
How we prepare Shopify for BFCM
Kyle Petroski and Matthew Frail's inside look at the nine months of capacity planning, chaos engineering, and load testing at 150% of projected peak that goes into Shopify surviving Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a weekend that hit 489 million requests per minute across 90 petabytes of data in 2025. What stands out is the organizational structure as much as the technical one: capacity planning, infrastructure roadmap, and readiness testing run as three parallel tracks for most of a year. A good reminder that scaling for a known traffic spike is a program, not a sprint right before the event.
Career paths for software engineers at large tech companies
Ethan Evans, a former Amazon VP, writing for Gergely Orosz's Pragmatic Engineer, on the actual paths available once you're a handful of years into a big-tech career, IC, management, and the several flavors in between, with the kind of specific, level-by-level detail that generic "career ladder" documentation never gives you. I recommend this to anyone who feels like they're supposed to have a five-year plan but nobody's ever explained what the actual forks in the road look like. A good companion piece to the Staff+ Engineer article already on this list.