Field notes — Boris

May 2026 Mental Models

The First Principles Mindset: Deconstructing Problems Before Writing a Single Line of Code

A shop wanted a "smart scheduler" to cut steel with as little waste as possible, and the obvious answer was a constraint solver. Standing next to the machine for one shift showed the waste was never the thing that cost money.

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May 2026 Simplicity & Complexity

The Cognitive Cost of Cleverness: Why "Boring" Technology is Usually the Right Choice

For years the clever design kept turning into the file nobody wanted to touch. Safety-wiring bolts on a 737 finally told me why, and it changed how I pick a job queue.

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May 2026 Architecture & Philosophy

The Case for Structural Simplicity: Why Code Duplication Often Beats Complex Abstractions

An abstraction that fuses two things which only look alike costs more than the duplication it removes. A worked example from a billing system, and the trade I take instead.

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Apr 2026 Leadership Mindset

The Ego-Less Architect: Letting Go of "My Way" in Favor of the "Right Way"

A 737 before-start checklist names the action, never the rank. I spent years confusing my preferred design with the correct one, and a junior engineer's pull request is what finally showed me the gap.

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Apr 2026 Craft & Metaphor

Software as Craftsmanship: Finding Pride in the Unseen Backend

A four-line pull request with a twelve-paragraph description, a fix nobody will ever see, and a 737 walkaround that produces no story. Where pride comes from when doing the work well means nobody notices.

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Apr 2026 Multi-Agent AI

Designing Resilient Inter-Agent Communication Protocols in Cloud Environments

Direct HTTP calls between agents read cleanly until the third one in a chain times out and erases the work of the first two. The fix is to make every agent message a durable, idempotent fact instead of a live conversation.

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Mar 2026 The Long Game

Sustaining Passion Over a Decade in Tech: Avoiding Architect Burnout

Boredom and burnout feel identical from the inside, so people apply the same fix to both and half the time pick the wrong one. A CAD pipeline I rewrote over a few weekends, on no one's orders, taught me to tell them apart.

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Mar 2026 Mental Models

Systems Thinking: Seeing the Forest When Everyone Else is Staring at the Trees

On a 737, the number that decides whether it flies isn't a weight on any scale — it's where the weight sits. A queue throughput problem I chased for a week turned out to be the same lesson, moved into software.

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Mar 2026 RAG & Data Engineering

Implementing Two-Phase RAG Systems for Unstructured Medical Documents

A discharge summary and a scanned consent form are both "a PDF," and they need different chunking, different metadata, and different retrieval rules. Classify and extract before you embed; filter on metadata before you rank.

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Notes on building systems

Archive

The First Principles Mindset: Deconstructing Problems Before Writing a Single Line of Code

The Cognitive Cost of Cleverness: Why "Boring" Technology is Usually the Right Choice

The Case for Structural Simplicity: Why Code Duplication Often Beats Complex Abstractions

The Ego-Less Architect: Letting Go of "My Way" in Favor of the "Right Way"

Software as Craftsmanship: Finding Pride in the Unseen Backend

Designing Resilient Inter-Agent Communication Protocols in Cloud Environments

Sustaining Passion Over a Decade in Tech: Avoiding Architect Burnout

Systems Thinking: Seeing the Forest When Everyone Else is Staring at the Trees

Implementing Two-Phase RAG Systems for Unstructured Medical Documents