Thoughts on engineering, craft, and the digital realm.https://ahmadsafii.work/en-ushttps://ahmadsafii.work/blog/why-clean-code-is-not-enough/https://ahmadsafii.work/blog/why-clean-code-is-not-enough/Writing readable code is table stakes. What separates good engineers from great ones is how they think about the system surrounding that code.Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://ahmadsafii.work/blog/on-shipping-smaller/https://ahmadsafii.work/blog/on-shipping-smaller/The most common reason software projects stall is not technical complexity. It is the habit of making things bigger than they need to be before anyone has seen them.Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://ahmadsafii.work/blog/the-database-index-you-forgot/https://ahmadsafii.work/blog/the-database-index-you-forgot/Most engineers understand that indexes speed up queries. Fewer understand why — and that gap produces systems that work fine until they do not.Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://ahmadsafii.work/blog/types-are-not-tests/https://ahmadsafii.work/blog/types-are-not-tests/A strong type system catches an entire class of bugs at compile time. Understanding what it cannot catch is just as important as understanding what it can.Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://ahmadsafii.work/blog/the-code-review-is-not-about-the-code/https://ahmadsafii.work/blog/the-code-review-is-not-about-the-code/We treat code reviews as a quality gate. They are something more important: the primary mechanism by which a team builds shared understanding of a system.Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://ahmadsafii.work/blog/the-lies-distributed-systems-tell/https://ahmadsafii.work/blog/the-lies-distributed-systems-tell/CAP theorem gets all the attention, but the real danger in distributed systems is subtler: the assumptions we make without realizing we're making them.Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT