I owe you an email

You signed up for this list at some point over the last few months, and then heard nothing at all. That one is on me. I kept writing, but I kept writing on the site and never sent anything here, which makes subscribing feel like posting a letter into a drawer. So this is the first one, and it is not the last.

What you can expect, so you can decide now rather than in three months: I write about system design decisions and about the jump from senior to staff. Something goes out when I have worked out something worth keeping. There is no weekly slot and there is not going to be one. If a fortnight passes and nothing arrives, that is because nothing was worth your inbox, which of the two available failures is the one I would rather commit.

Here is the thing I keep circling back to, and the reason most of what I write looks the way it does. The gap between a senior engineer and a staff engineer is not a longer list of patterns. Senior engineers can nearly always name the right answer. What separates the next step is being able to say, out loud, in front of people who disagree with you, why you did not pick the other one.

Nobody gets promoted for choosing Postgres. They get promoted for the sentence that begins "we chose Postgres over DynamoDB because our access pattern is", and then survives somebody pushing back on it. That sentence is a different skill from knowing the databases, and almost nobody is taught it deliberately.

It is also why so many design conversations go wrong in the same place. They reach for the answer before anyone has agreed what is being traded away. Latency against consistency. Coupling against flexibility. Cost against the operational load somebody carries at three in the morning. Put those on the table first and the answer very often argues for itself. Skip them and you spend the meeting defending a preference and calling it a design.

Two pieces of mine that people keep sending back to me, if you want somewhere to start:

Monorepo tools compared, NX, Turborepo, Bazel and Rush: https://gazar.dev/devops/monorepo-tools-comparison-nx-turborepo-bazel-rush

OAuth2, demystified with sequence diagrams: https://gazar.dev/system-design/demystifying-oauth2-sequence-diagrams

One last thing. If you reply to this, it reaches me and not a helpdesk. A good half of what I end up writing started life as a question somebody sent back, so a reply is genuinely the most useful thing you can send me.

Gazar