Infrastructure religion
Kubernetes
A container orchestration system and reliable generator of organizational opinions.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Companies with 12–10,000 engineers
- 🦈 Predator
- docker compose
- 🤒 Symptom
- YAML
TOPICS · A FIELD GUIDE
Engineering species, observed in the wild.
Every technology is somebody's religion and somebody else's incident. Here are 42 specimens, their habitat, their natural predators, and who on the team will defend them to the death.
42 species catalogued15 📈 spreading2 🚨 endangered1 🦄 rarely confirmed
🔥 MOST CONTESTED SPECIMEN
Repository doctrine
Monorepo
The belief that proximity of code can create proximity of teams, builds and arguments.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Organizations that share code
- 🦈 Predator
- Team autonomy
- 🤒 Symptom
- One pull request changes everything
Architectural belief
Microservices
Independent services that allow organizational boundaries to become network boundaries.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Scaling organizations and premature startups
- 🦈 Predator
- Latency
- 🤒 Symptom
- Distributed tracing
Development methodology
Vibe Coding
Software development in which intent is crisp, implementation is generated, and archaeology begins unusually early.
- 🏠 Habitat
- AI-native teams
- 🦈 Predator
- Six months later
- 🤒 Symptom
- Nobody knows why it works
Agent integration protocol
MCP
A standardized way to let models discover tools, and engineers discover they now have too many tools.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Any API Taylor can see
- 🦈 Predator
- Tool sprawl
- 🤒 Symptom
- We should make an MCP server
Sovereignty practice
Self-hosting
Replacing a vendor dependency with a personal operational responsibility.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Home labs and engineering founders
- 🦈 Predator
- Saturday afternoon
- 🤒 Symptom
- Another container
Confidence metric
Test Coverage
A number strongly correlated with the percentage of code executed by tests.
- 🏠 Habitat
- CI dashboards
- 🦈 Predator
- Meaningful assertions
- 🤒 Symptom
- 100%
Procurement conflict
Build vs Buy
A recurring attempt to compare a vendor invoice with engineering time valued at zero.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Every roadmap meeting
- 🦈 Predator
- Total cost of ownership
- 🤒 Symptom
- It would only take us two weeks
Labor abstraction
Agents
Software given tools, memory and enough autonomy to generate both leverage and new categories of incident.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Developer workflows
- 🦈 Predator
- Permissions
- 🤒 Symptom
- Let it run overnight
Operational practice
Observability
The process of collecting enough information to confidently misunderstand why production is down.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Systems with users
- 🦈 Predator
- Cardinality bills
- 🤒 Symptom
- One more dashboard
Engineering ritual
The Rewrite
A fresh implementation unburdened by legacy decisions and, briefly, production requirements.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Mature codebases
- 🦈 Predator
- Feature requests
- 🤒 Symptom
- This time we’ll do it properly
Security doctrine
Zero Trust
Never trust, always verify, eventually create a ticket.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Enterprise architecture diagrams
- 🦈 Predator
- User experience
- 🤒 Symptom
- Please authenticate again
Release practice
Feature Flags
A conditional that separates deploying code from releasing it, and eventually from understanding it.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Main branch, indefinitely
- 🦈 Predator
- Flag cleanup
- 🤒 Symptom
- Which flag is on in prod?
Infrastructure belief
Serverless
Servers you do not manage, billed by the millisecond, debugged by the afternoon.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Spiky workloads and cloud credit programs
- 🦈 Predator
- Cold starts
- 🤒 Symptom
- Fourteen functions to send one email
API doctrine
GraphQL
A query language that lets clients ask for exactly what they need, and lets the backend find out what that costs.
- 🏠 Habitat
- One backend with four frontends
- 🦈 Predator
- N+1 queries
- 🤒 Symptom
- Let me check the resolver
Geographic aspiration
The Edge
Running code close to the user, so it can wait for a database close to nobody.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Landing pages and latency charts
- 🦈 Predator
- The database in us-east-1
- 🤒 Symptom
- It’s 4ms faster in Singapore
Organizational doctrine
Platform Engineering
A team that paves the road for every other team, then studies why they still drive through the field.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Organizations past their third deploy pipeline
- 🦈 Predator
- Internal adoption
- 🤒 Symptom
- Have you tried the golden path?
Visual governance
Design Systems
A shared component library that makes every screen consistent, including the ones that needed to be different.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Figma, and three forked npm packages
- 🦈 Predator
- The one-off
- 🤒 Symptom
- Can we add a variant?
Forecasting ritual
Story Points
A unit of effort carefully defined as not being time, converted into time by everyone who sees it.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Sprint planning
- 🦈 Predator
- The calendar
- 🤒 Symptom
- Is that a 3 or a 5?
Synchronization ritual
Daily Standup
A fifteen-minute meeting where the team learns, out loud and in turn, what was already in the tracker.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Every calendar at 9:30
- 🦈 Predator
- Async updates
- 🤒 Symptom
- Let’s take that offline
Deliberation format
Design Docs
A document written to make a decision, reviewed until the decision has already shipped.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Shared drives and comment threads
- 🦈 Predator
- The prototype
- 🤒 Symptom
- Left a few comments
Financial metaphor
Technical Debt
A loan taken out by past engineers, repaid by current ones, at an interest rate nobody wrote down.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Any codebase older than its first customer
- 🦈 Predator
- The roadmap
- 🤒 Symptom
- We’ll clean it up after launch
Data sovereignty movement
Local-first
Software that works offline, syncs later and resolves conflicts eventually, sometimes philosophically.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Note-taking apps and conference talks
- 🦈 Predator
- Sync bugs
- 🤒 Symptom
- It works on a plane
Database heresy
SQLite in Production
A file that is also a database that is also, it turns out, a production architecture.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Single-server apps and the blog posts about them
- 🦈 Predator
- The second server
- 🤒 Symptom
- Just copy the file
Interface preference
Dark Mode
A second color scheme, requested by everyone, designed by one person, and tested at night by users.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Settings pages and 2 a.m.
- 🦈 Predator
- Hardcoded #ffffff
- 🤒 Symptom
- The logo disappeared
Productivity legend
The 10x Engineer
An engineer whose output is ten times a peer’s, depending heavily on who is counting and when.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Founder anecdotes and hiring pages
- 🦈 Predator
- The bus factor
- 🤒 Symptom
- Only she understands the billing code
Triage ritual
Ticket Priority
A four-level scale on which every customer ticket is, according to the customer, P0.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Support queues and the CEO's inbox
- 🦈 Predator
- The customer who emailed the CEO
- 🤒 Symptom
- URGENT!!! in the subject line
Empathy program
Support Rotation
A week in which engineers answer customer tickets, discover the product, and file eleven bugs against their own code.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Startups that just hired their first support lead
- 🦈 Predator
- The sprint deadline
- 🤒 Symptom
- Wait, users do that?
Deflection technology
The Support Chatbot
A friendly assistant that resolves 60% of tickets, measured as the share of customers who gave up.
- 🏠 Habitat
- The bottom-right corner of every pricing page
- 🦈 Predator
- Typing "human" four times
- 🤒 Symptom
- Did this answer your question?
Commercial doctrine
The Customer Is Always Right
A principle stating that the customer is right about the problem and, occasionally and expensively, about the solution.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Sales calls and enterprise renewals
- 🦈 Predator
- The second customer, who wants the opposite
- 🤒 Symptom
- They're our biggest account
Alignment ceremony
The All-Hands
A monthly gathering where the whole company hears the strategy at once, then asks about the parking in the Q&A.
- 🏠 Habitat
- The biggest room, or 140 muted video tiles
- 🦈 Predator
- The Q&A
- 🤒 Symptom
- Great question, let's take it offline
Career artifact
The Promotion Packet
A document proving the author's impact, written in the time that could have been spent having some.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Calibration season
- 🦈 Predator
- The calibration committee
- 🤒 Symptom
- Drove cross-functional alignment
Growth ritual
Experimentation
Running many small bets to learn what works, and occasionally learning that nobody agreed what was being tested.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Startups with more ideas than users
- 🦈 Predator
- Statistical significance
- 🤒 Symptom
- Twelve live A/B tests on the same 2,000 users
Empirical practice
User Research
Watching real people use the product, then discovering they do not use it the way the roadmap said.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Design teams with a screen recorder
- 🦈 Predator
- The highest-paid opinion in the room
- 🤒 Symptom
- “User 4 hesitated.”
Financial hobby
Cost Optimization
Reducing the infrastructure bill, frequently using engineers whose salary is not on the bill.
- 🏠 Habitat
- The monthly cloud invoice review
- 🦈 Predator
- The engineer-month
- 🤒 Symptom
- A graph going down, posted in #wins
Architectural reflex
Premature Abstraction
Making something generic before the second use case exists, so that the third one can arrive and not fit.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Codebases with exactly one payment provider
- 🦈 Predator
- The third provider
- 🤒 Symptom
- ProviderAgnosticCapabilityLayerFactory
Measurement faith
Metrics
Numbers chosen to describe whether things are going well, until they become the thing everyone works on instead.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Quarterly planning decks
- 🦈 Predator
- Goodhart's law
- 🤒 Symptom
- Twelve dashboards, one opinion each
Reproductive ritual
Hiring
Adding people to the team, usually to solve the problem the previous hire was meant to solve.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Five-round interview loops
- 🦈 Predator
- The competing offer
- 🤒 Symptom
- A take-home exercise longer than the job
Load-bearing gift
Open-Source Dependencies
Code written by strangers, for free, that the company's revenue quietly rests on.
- 🏠 Habitat
- package.json, around line 400
- 🦈 Predator
- The maintainer's burnout
- 🤒 Symptom
- A critical library with one contributor in Nebraska
Social infrastructure
Team Rituals
Offsites, team buildings and escape games designed to build trust, attended by people who would rather be shipping.
- 🏠 Habitat
- The quarterly offsite
- 🦈 Predator
- The release deadline
- 🤒 Symptom
- Mandatory fun on a Thursday afternoon
Quality ritual
Continuous Integration
A pipeline that proves every change is safe, in roughly the time it takes to forget what the change was.
- 🏠 Habitat
- The pull request page, under “Some checks haven't completed yet”
- 🦈 Predator
- The monthly minutes invoice
- 🤒 Symptom
- Waiting for CI
Nondeterministic species
Flaky Tests
A test that fails one run in twenty, and teaches a whole organization that red means “click retry”.
- 🏠 Habitat
- Integration suites that touch time, network or ordering
- 🦈 Predator
- Quarantine, eventually permanent
- 🤒 Symptom
- Just re-run it
No species matches. Maybe it's still in beta.