The notes I would have wanted at fifteen.
Long form pieces on shipping production systems, scaling SaaS, hiring engineers, AI integration, and the engineering decisions behind Yashveer Labs.
799 posts · page 26 of 34
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Boy Scout Rule in Practice: Leaving Code Better Than You Found It
The boy scout rule applied to engineering: what it means to leave code better, the limits of the rule, and how to practice it without derailing your sprint.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
Why Your Test Suite Is Slow and How to Fix It
A slow test suite is a quiet productivity tax. Most of the slowness is a small number of fixable causes. This is the order I work in, and the patterns I see most often when I take over a slow CI pipeline.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Multi Year Refactor: Cultural Patterns That Make It Stick
The team behaviors that turn a multi-year refactor from a stalled wishlist into steady, measurable progress -- without stopping product work.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Database Migration Without Downtime
How to run a schema migration on a live production database without taking the application offline or losing a single row of data.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Refactor Sprint: When a Quarter of the Roadmap Becomes Cleanup
Sometimes the team needs to stop shipping features and spend a quarter cleaning up the codebase. Here is how to run that sprint without losing the team, the product manager, or the deployment pipeline.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Pareto Refactor: Twenty Percent Effort for Eighty Percent Improvement
Most refactor work improves the codebase by less than it costs in disruption. The Pareto refactor finds the twenty percent of changes that produce eighty percent of the improvement, and stops there.
11 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Legacy Codebase: A Senior Engineer's Five Day Audit
How to assess a codebase you inherited in five days -- what to read, what to run, and what to report to the team before writing a single line.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
Why TypeScript Almost Always Pays Off in SaaS
TypeScript is not faster to write. It is faster to maintain, faster to refactor, and faster to onboard new engineers into. For a SaaS that will live for years, that math is decisive.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Quiet Cost of Skipping Type Safety
Type safety has a price to add and a price to skip. The price to skip is paid slowly, in bugs that are hard to trace and refactors that take twice as long as they should.
13 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Engineering Migration: Patterns That Work
The patterns that make database migrations, infrastructure migrations, and system rewrites survivable in production without downtime or data loss.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Architecture Decision Record: A Lightweight Discipline
What an ADR is, why teams that write them make better decisions faster, and the format that takes 20 minutes to write and saves months of rework.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Mock Versus Real Service Debate
When to mock external services in tests and when to use real ones -- and why the answer differs for unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Test Pyramid for SaaS: Unit, Integration, End to End
Working notes on the test pyramid for saas: unit, integration, end to end. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on tech debt and refactoring from someone who has shipped the work.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Tech Debt Negotiation: How Engineers Should Talk to Founders About It
Working notes on the tech debt negotiation: how engineers should talk to founders about it. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on tech debt and refactoring from someone who has shipped the work.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Tech Debt Ledger: A Discipline Worth Keeping
Working notes on the tech debt ledger: a discipline worth keeping. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on tech debt and refactoring from someone who has shipped the work.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
Why Most Rewrites Fail
Working notes on why most rewrites fail. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on tech debt and refactoring from someone who has shipped the work.
13 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Strangler Fig Pattern: Replacing Legacy in Stages
The strangler fig is the only migration pattern I trust for large legacy systems. It keeps the old system running while the new one grows around it, one surface at a time, until the original can be retired.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
When to Refactor and When to Rewrite
Working notes on when to refactor and when to rewrite. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on tech debt and refactoring from someone who has shipped the work.
12 min read
- Tech Debt and Refactoring
The Tech Debt Audit: A Two Day Process
A structured two-day process for auditing technical debt across an existing codebase. What to look at, how to score it, and what to do with the findings before they get buried.
12 min read
- DevOps, Deployment, Infrastructure
The First Hire in DevOps: When and What
The signals that tell you it is time to hire a dedicated DevOps or infrastructure engineer -- and what the role should actually cover at startup scale.
12 min read
- DevOps, Deployment, Infrastructure
The Quiet Cost of Vendor Lock In: A Practical Audit
Vendor lock in is rarely a disaster you see coming. It arrives as a pricing change, an API deprecation, or a contract renewal you cannot walk away from. Here is how to audit your exposure before it matters.
11 min read
- DevOps, Deployment, Infrastructure
The Customer Communication Playbook for Incidents
What to say to customers during an outage, when to say it, and how to write the update that rebuilds trust after the incident ends.
12 min read
- DevOps, Deployment, Infrastructure
The Engineering Dashboard Every Founder Should Have
The metrics a technical founder needs to see daily to understand whether the engineering team is healthy and the product is reliable.
12 min read
- DevOps, Deployment, Infrastructure
The Migration From Heroku: A Step By Step
How to migrate off Heroku without downtime: the sequence, the gotchas, and the platforms worth considering in 2026.
12 min read
More than blog posts.
The Labs folder has the experiments themselves. The Systems folder has the stack and architecture. The Journey folder has the timeline. Pick whichever pulls you.