davidvartanian

I was leading a team and everything felt slow. Everyone was busy, but shipping features was still very slow. We tracked velocity and story points, but those metrics don't even care about how good a business is doing or…

I used to believe that defining clean interfaces and contracts between services was enough to maintain modularity. I shared a database because it seemed like the path of least resistance. I was wrong. Sharing a database…

I was a heavy user of Google Antigravity for my development workflow. I relied on its token throughput to automate boilerplate and architectural prototyping. The recent pricing update and draconian rate limits feel like…

I spent a few years working at a company where all our microservices backed into MongoDB instances. We were constantly under top-down pressure to deliver fast, and because MongoDB is schemaless, it felt very easy to…

I spent the last two weeks struggling with AI costs going up like crazy. I realized I had been treating AI tokens as if they were free. Like many others, I fell into the trap of using premium, Ferrari-level models to…

I used to think that interface design was purely a technical concern. I focused on data structures, schema validation, and minimizing latency. I ignored the human factor. I recently realized that our teams were…

I was building a system a few years ago under immense pressure to ship. We had a choice. We could implement a new API call between two domains, or we could duplicate the domain data into multiple service databases. I…