Every Senior Engineer Has a Tech Stack. Few Have a Decision-Making Stack. Here Is Mine.
5 years of shipping code and the biggest upgrade in my career had nothing to do with a framework. It was learning how to make better calls when everything is on fire and the deadline was yesterday.
So how do I actually work?
I Start With the Mess, Not the Solution
What is the timeline. What is the team size. Are we optimizing for speed or scale or just trying to survive the next quarter. I need those answers before I open my editor.
Picking NestJS over Express is not about what I like. Its about what the project needs 8 months from now when three new devs join and nobody remembers why anything works.
I Pick Boring Tech. On Purpose.
PostgreSQL over whatever showed up on Hacker News this morning. React over the cool new thing that has 200 GitHub stars and no docs.
I want tools that behave at 2 AM when prod is down and I am half asleep debugging something I wrote 6 months ago. Boring is beautiful.
I Build for v2. Not v5.
Hot take - over-engineering is just as expensive as under-engineering. It just makes you feel smarter while doing it.
I build for what we know today, sketch loosely for 6 months out, leave clean extension points, and ship. I have seen way too many projects die because someone spent 3 weeks architecting for 10 million users when they had 12.
CI/CD Is Not a DevOps Thing. It's a Shipping Thing.
If deploying feels scary the team ships less. Thats it. Thats the whole argument.
I set up pipelines early because every manual deploy is a silent tax on velocity that nobody talks about until its too late.
I Write Code for the Person Who Reads It Next
That person is probably a junior dev 3 months from now. Or me after I completely forgot what I was thinking.
Either way - clear names, small functions, comments that explain the why not the what. Clever code impresses nobody at 3 AM. Clear code saves everyone.
I Write Decisions Down
Not because I love process. Because 6 months from now nobody will remember why we went with approach A over approach B.
A quick doc - problem, options, what we picked, what we traded off - takes 20 minutes and kills hours of circular debates later.
The Common Thread?
Kill ambiguity. Make trade-offs loud. Ship every week.
Engineering leadership is not about having all the answers. It is about making the call, owning what happens next, and building stuff that does not fall apart when real people start clicking.
That is how I work.
Architecture-first. Ship always.