When a risky operation is scattered across thirty files, teams, or people, it's invisible. Move it to one place and you can audit it, test it, fix it once.
7 min readHow a shared interface between parties who don't understand each other's work solves problems across software, teams, and entire industries. From a pipeline config to a shipping container.
8 min readWhat map colouring, sprint planning, and CPU register allocation have in common -- and why the maths behind all three has been solved since 1852.
8 min readTicketing systems aren't bureaucracy. They're the organisational equivalent of async interfaces. The real problem is what happens when the queue backs up.
7 min readWhy we named the company after a hippo, the philosophy of invisible infrastructure, and what Potamus does.
4 min readWhy a single north-star metric turns 'are our engineers doing useful work?' from an opinion fight into a spreadsheet. Lessons from Bolt's GMV.
6 min readAmdahl's law applied to engineering productivity. Why brilliant engineers stuck in operational mud output like average ones, and why investing in operations matters more than hiring.
7 min readWhy a clean interface hiding a terrible implementation beats a clean implementation behind a terrible interface. Applied to pipelines, APIs, and deployment tools.
6 min readThe anti-pattern of data scientists filing tickets to deploy models, what declarative self-service pipelines look like, and why DS owning their lifecycle changes everything.
8 min readHow I cut ML build times from 40 minutes to 5. What causes slow builds in ML, and practical techniques to fix them.
9 min readWhy the traditional model of DE as a serial gatekeeper between data science and infrastructure creates bottlenecks, and how a shared platform interface eliminates the pattern entirely.
7 min readThe classic scaling pain: going from fewer than 10 ML models to 200+ at Bolt. Signs your team has hit the wall, and what self-service looks like when it works.
8 min read