- Situation
- Technology choices were announced rather than argued, so nobody outside the room could challenge them and debates reopened later.
- Task
- Make the reasoning behind each decision outlive the decision, without imposing heavy documentation.
- Action
- I set a standing practice: name the choice, name the closest shortlisted alternative, and link to where the why lives, in a small table.
- Result
- The practice carried across projects and became what new decisions arrive with, so decisions can be reviewed on their reasoning.
◈ View in the world- Situation
- A messaging product ran Keycloak for identity, yet users, roles and organisations already lived in Dgraph, so every write landed twice.
- Task
- Remove the dual write and its compensating code, and get to one store of record.
- Action
- I checked which Keycloak features were used, found none beyond authentication, which NestJS covers, and wrote a decision record proposing its removal.
- Result
- The dependency and its rollback logic came out, leaving the backend with a single store of record.
◈ View in the world- Situation
- A document assistant for a fleet operator needed an architecture, and one model trained on every vessel's documents was the assumed default.
- Task
- Lay out the real trade-offs of cost, latency and access control instead of just picking one.
- Action
- I wrote both options out for client and team: one shared model versus one model per vessel, with pros, cons and the replica arithmetic.
- Result
- The partitioned design went forward, with the loss of cross-fleet questions accepted openly.
◈ View in the world- Situation
- Cloud spend was climbing, and no single person could see which servers it went to because billing access was split.
- Task
- Establish the real footprint before deciding what to shut down.
- Action
- I scripted a sweep across cloud projects that listed every virtual machine with its project and state, then sequenced access, pruning and backups.
- Result
- Pruning followed the inventory instead of guesswork, and the sweep set the order of what to stop.
◈ View in the world- Situation
- A senior engineering candidate had been assessed by a reviewer I trusted, and the recommendation was already written.
- Task
- Decide whether I agreed by reading the candidate's actual work rather than the review of it.
- Action
- I reviewed both pull requests, issue discussions and documents independently, then wrote my assessment point by point, differing on the algorithmic work.
- Result
- The decision changed on the merits, and the reviewer could see which points I accepted, setting the expectation that recommendations are examined.
◈ View in the world- Situation
- Two pipelines had each been split into many microservices that shipped, failed and were debugged together, adding cost without independence.
- Task
- Make the case for consolidation on operational cost, with the boundary authors in the room.
- Action
- I wrote up the reasoning for a loosely coupled monolith, keeping only the seams with distinct scaling or failure characteristics and merging the rest.
- Result
- Fewer services to deploy, fewer cross-service failures to trace, and each remaining split could be defended individually.
◈ View in the world- Situation
- Model spend was climbing across products, and the instinct was to change models or shrink prompts without breaking the bill down.
- Task
- Cut cost through a mechanism we could explain, without switching to a cheaper model and losing quality.
- Action
- I reviewed usage per project so consumption was attributable, saw identical completions paid for repeatedly, implemented prompt-completion caching, and tracked the bill afterwards.
- Result
- Cost fell sharply with no change to models or outputs.
◈ View in the world