Amon Taboi is the founder of Crescevo and editor of Crescevo Tech. He architects the self-hosted engineering stack behind Crescevo and writes on systems, infrastructure, and pragmatic software delivery.
tech
TL;DR * Technical debt exists on a spectrum and most engineering teams manage it with a combination of instinct and complaint, rather than a systematic view of the debt portfolio, which can lead to reactive rather than strategic remediation. * According to Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the technical debt metaphor,
tech
TL;DR * A 45-minute CI pipeline can result in 27.5 hours of wall-clock time lost daily for a team that runs 50 builds per day. * Most test suites can be split across multiple runners with 80 to 90 percent efficiency, significantly reducing overall test execution time. * Dependency installation can
tech
TL;DR * The standard engineering hiring screen, which involves LeetCode-style algorithm problems, correlates with job performance at approximately the same level as a coin flip for most engineering roles. * About 90 percent of real engineering jobs consist of ambiguous, collaborative, context-dependent work, which is not measured by LeetCode interviews. * Work
tech
TL;DR * Six months after a significant technical decision was made, the person who made it may have left and the team may be relitigating it or making a conflicting decision. * According to Michael Nygard, the test of an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is whether someone six months later can
tech
TL;DR * On-call burnout can lead to expensive turnover and significant knowledge loss as engineers who are chronically on-call may leave their companies, albeit not immediately, but steadily. * A four-person rotation on weekly shifts results in each engineer being on-call for one full week every month, which can be miserable
tech
TL;DR * Ghost provides a Content API, a read-only REST API that returns posts, pages, tags, and authors in structured JSON, with no authentication required for public content and an API key required for member-only content. * The Admin API in Ghost is a write API for creating and updating content
tech
TL;DR * Teams that decompose a monolith into microservices prematurely often end up with a distributed monolith, managing around 30 services, two years later. * The common complaints about monoliths, such as slow build times, can be solved using techniques like incremental compilation, build caching with tools like Turborepo, Gradle, or
tech
TL;DR * AI code review tools are most effective in tasks such as pattern detection at scale, documentation gaps, and security anti-patterns, including issues like hardcoded credentials and SQL injection vectors. * The use of AI code review for architecture decisions often adds noise, as AI reviewers are trained on code
jobs
Related reading * Welcome to Tech Weekly — Issue #1 * Migrating from Go to Rust * Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025) Before you go — a free checklist Shipping a service? The Production Readiness Checklist covers the 30 things to verify before it goes live — reliability, observability, deploys, security,
newsletter
TL;DR * ARM-based silicon now dominates the high-performance laptop market with Apple's M1 series leading the way with roughly half the power draw of Intel's fastest laptop chips. * AWS Graviton3 instances launched in 2022 offered 25% better compute performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency
newsletter