Challenges

These are the problems I’ve run into repeatedly across different projects, teams and contexts. They aren’t unsolved, but they rarely have clean answers. Each one involves real tensions between competing concerns, and where I’ve landed often depends on the context.

Each article follows the same structure: what the challenge is, where it surfaces, the tensions within it, where I’ve landed, and what I’ve seen go wrong.

• Early Solutions Become De Facto Solutions: getting early feedback without an early solution becoming permanent before it’s been properly considered.
• Tests That Earn Their Keep: TDD, test strategy, and keeping a test suite an asset rather than a burden.
• Documenting Architecture Without It Going Stale: documenting enough to communicate and coordinate, without creating documents nobody maintains.