Topic
ajaykandakatla
8 posts
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May 12, 2026
TDD Was a Beautiful Lie. AI Just Made It True.
For twelve years I claimed to practice TDD. I was lying. So was almost everyone I worked with. AI just made it real for the first time.
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May 12, 2026
The Three Horsemen of Slow: SAFe, Microservices, and Microfrontends
Twelve years inside enterprise software taught me that SAFe, microservices, and microfrontends are not coincidentally slow. They are designed to feel productive while displacing the work.
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May 12, 2026
Four Apps in Five Days with Claude Code — What Actually Changed
Five days. Four shipped applications. A portfolio, an architecture builder, a credit servicing platform, a kids' drawing app. The interesting part is not what got built. It's what stopped blocking me.
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May 12, 2026
Microfrontends in the Real World: Five Lessons from Enterprise Banking
I led the microfrontend strategy at a top-10 US bank. Five years later, I can tell you exactly which lessons held up and which ones I now think were dressed-up monolith problems. This is the case study that made me write The Three Horsemen of Slow.
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May 12, 2026
Two Paths from Tech Lead: Engineering Manager or Architect Manager
Most senior engineers don't realize they're standing at a fork in the road until they've already walked one path for two years. I walked both. Here's what the choice actually costs.
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May 11, 2026
The Million Token Mirage
I just spent the last week stress-testing the new 1M context window against the standard 200k limit. The performance is undeniably impressive—the model handles massive, sprawling datasets with a level
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May 11, 2026
The Local LLM Delusion
The current obsession with running massive models locally is a distraction. I see engineers bragging about their hardware specs, their liquid-cooled rigs, and their massive VRAM allocations as if they
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May 11, 2026
The Kitchen as a Debugging Tool
I don't cook because I need to eat. I cook because I need to think, and more importantly, because I need to stop thinking for a while.