Engineering on Rough Edges

Your Test Strategy Should Match Your Reality

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

The critique of over-mocking in unit tests is worth taking seriously. It’s a real problem, and it’s more widespread than the industry generally acknowledges.

When you mock every dependency in a unit test, you’re no longer testing whether your code works – you’re testing whether your code does what you told your mocks to pretend the dependencies do. If the mocks don’t reflect production behavior, your tests pass and your production system still breaks. Worse, those tests make your codebase rigid. Every internal refactor requires updating a web of mock expectations, which creates friction, which leads to tests being deleted rather than maintained, which defeats the purpose entirely.

Your Infrastructure Costs Are Telling You Something – But Maybe Not What You Think

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

High infrastructure costs are worth paying attention to. Teams that never look at their cloud bills tend to accumulate waste quietly – redundant logging pipelines, forgotten container registries, storage that nobody owns. Getting engineers to care about the cost of what they build is a legitimate goal, and one that’s harder than it sounds.

But the diagnosis matters as much as the observation.

The claim that elevated infrastructure costs primarily signal expertise gaps is too simple. Sometimes high costs reflect poor decisions. Sometimes they reflect genuine scale, regulatory requirements, or deliberate tradeoffs made during rapid growth. Sometimes they’re a combination. The work is figuring out which you’re dealing with before reaching for a solution.

Rough Edges

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:20:00 -0400

I'm an engineering manager. I've spent years building teams, shipping software, and keeping infrastructure from catching fire – sometimes successfully.

The name is deliberate. Rough edges aren't a failure of craft. They're what you get when you make real decisions under real constraints. Every system has them. Every team has them. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn't shipped anything lately.

The philosophy

I'm pragmatic by nature. I believe, genuinely and without irony, that perfect is the enemy of the good.