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The five things every system design has to make concrete decisions about: data, state, control flow, failure, and observability. Each one is a hinge point where good and bad designs diverge.

The unipolar security umbrella that has shaped the world since 1945 is not collapsing. It is being replaced, piece by piece, by overlapping regional balances. The Iran war revealed the gaps. The Quad's evolution shows how the replacements get built. Part I of a four-part series on how the post-1945 order is being rewritten in 2026.

A few days back in New York with my wife. The city I went to grad school in, still very much itself, and still doing the work of being too many cities at once. Skyscrapers, villages, a return to Washington Square, an autumn loop through Central Park, and a dinner that we are still talking about.

How a staff engineer actually approaches a system design in the wild. Framing the problem, separating requirements from constraints from tradeoffs, surfacing hidden assumptions, sketching before deciding, and treating the design as a communication artifact.

How engineering leaders manage up, across, and down; translate engineering work for non-technical audiences; defend technical debt and budget; and influence outcomes far beyond the formal authority of the role.