The Sunday dispatch.
One essay, every week, no fluff.
// A weekly letter on engineering systems, product tradeoffs, and what I’m learning. Sent Sunday mornings IST. Currently ~6,200 engineersreading — principal engineers, CTOs, founders, and a surprising number of staff researchers.
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// Powered by Buttondown. No ads. No referral schemes. No “just one more” popup. Your address goes nowhere except into the From line on Sunday.
What you get
- ▸ One long-ish essay (8–14 min read) on engineering or product.
- ▸ 2–3 things I read this week worth your time.
- ▸ What I’m shipping in public.
- ▸ Occasionally a question I want your take on.
What you don’t get
- ▸ “Top 10 React tips”.
- ▸ AI-generated filler.
- ▸ Course launches. Cohort drops. “Limited spots.”
01 / who reads it
38%
staff / principal eng
22%
CTO / VP eng
18%
founders
14%
mid-level engineers
5%
PMs / designers
3%
other
02 / recent issues
#042
The ledger is the productOn building primitives you can’t fork later — the four properties of a ledger that survives.
05·19
14 min
→
#041
Replays, not retriesTreating agent runs like database transactions. What works, what doesn’t, why LangChain isn’t enough.
05·12
9 min
→
#040
A taxonomy of background jobsSix modes for moving work off the request path — and the flowchart I use to pick between them.
05·05
11 min
→
#039
Owning the buildMoving a team from Jira to a one-page roadmap. A small retro on consolidating 14 tools.
04·28
7 min
→
#038
Postgres is a queue, a cache, and a feature flag service…until it isn’t. Concrete thresholds at which each abuse stops being clever.
04·21
12 min
→
#037
The shape of an AI-native codebaseWhat changes when half your team is Claude and Cursor.
04·14
10 min
→
#036
Boring fintechA working architecture for moving real money. Idempotency keys, double-entry, audit trails.
04·07
16 min
→
#035
tRPC at scaleWhat breaks at 200 endpoints, and the small tweaks that make it survive.
03·31
8 min
→
+ 34 older issues since Jan 2023full archive →
03 / reader notes
The one newsletter I open Sunday morning before my coffee’s done. Most of the rest go to archive.
Mireille TanPrincipal Eng · Asana
Mohit writes the way I wish my staff engineers thought. I share two issues a quarter with my team.
Kenji ParkCTO · Folio
No fluff. No bait. Reads like sitting next to a senior engineer who actually wants you to get it.
Anna VolkovaFounder · Telemetric