technical debt
software quality
The Fallacy of 'We'll Refactor It Later': How Technical Debt Compounds
Core: Every engineer knows the promise: “We’ll refactor this later.” Nobody has refactored code written three years ago. …
Jan 31, 2026Walid Eltifi
Sharing personal experiences, technical insights, and thoughtful perspectives on IT trends and world events.
Technology Essays
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project management
estimation
Why Estimation Is Broken (And What Actually Works)
Core: Your company probably asks engineers to estimate how long tasks will take. Your engineers probably give estimates that are wrong. This …
Jan 31, 2026Career Reflections
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leadership
career development
Navigating Career Transitions in Tech: Moving From Individual Contributor To Leadership
Core: Becoming a leader feels like a promotion but is actually a role change. The skills that made you excellent as an engineer often hinder …
Jan 31, 2026Software Development
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microservices
distributed systems
Building Microservices: Lessons From A Decade of Distributed Systems
Core: Microservices are deceptively simple in theory but extraordinarily complex in practice. After a decade building distributed systems, …
Jan 31, 2026
code quality
technical debt
When Code Quality Becomes Tech Debt: Knowing When To Refactor
Core: The worst code I’ve seen wasn’t messy—it was over-engineered. Teams spent months optimizing readability, modularity, and …
Jan 31, 2026System Architecture
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databases
scaling
Scaling Databases: When Sharding, Replication, and Caching Become Necessary
Core: Most scaling discussions happen at the wrong scale. Teams implement sharding at 100GB when they should be at 10TB. They add caching …
Jan 31, 2026
Docker
containerization
The Docker Optimization Trap: When Containerization Makes Deployments Slower
Core: Docker promised to simplify deployments. We adopted it expecting 2-minute deploys. We got 12-minute deploys instead. The lesson: …
Jan 31, 2026Industry Commentary
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legacy systems
technology cycles
The Great Technology Replacement Cycle: Why Legacy Systems Win
Core: In 2008, we built a new payment system to replace our “outdated” Java monolith from 2003. It was modern: Rails, …
Feb 01, 2026
open source
maintenance
Open Source Maintenance: Why It's Harder Than Building From Scratch
Core: Open source looks like a gift economy. People contribute for free. In reality, successful open source is backed by significant …
Jan 31, 2026Personal Musings
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Expected insights coming soon to Personal Musings.