These principles define how I think about architecture, delivery, and engineering leadership.
They are not preferences or best practices.
They are constraints — rules that exist to preserve correctness, reduce risk, and make change safe over time.
They are grouped into five pillars.
I. Architecture as Constraint
Architecture exists to constrain complexity over time.
- Architecture is the practice of preventing accidental complexity from becoming the dominant cost.
- If a system is hard to change, the architecture has already failed.
- Good architecture is not created once; it is practiced continuously.
- Frameworks do not create systems. Boundaries do.
- If a system is hard to reason about, that is not a tooling problem.
- If you cannot explain the system, you do not control it.
- Scalability is not a feature. It is the result of early boundary decisions.
- Every system eventually reflects the shape of the organization that builds it. Design both deliberately.
- Architecture must account for composition: how independently correct systems combine into larger behaviors.
Architecture is not about diagrams.
It is about shaping systems so they remain understandable and changeable as they grow.
II. System Honesty
A system must never lie about what it is or what it can do.
- Fake behavior in production systems is a form of technical debt.
- If a system can lie about its state, it will eventually do so at the worst possible time.
- Partial implementations that present themselves as complete are failures of design.
- Failure must be explicit, observable, and part of the contract.
- Development and test modes must not misrepresent reality.
- Feature flags are honesty boundaries: a capability does not exist unless its invariants and failure modes are real.
Systems that appear healthy while hiding incomplete or unsafe behavior accumulate invisible risk.
III. Reproducibility and Determinism
If behavior cannot be reproduced, it cannot be trusted.
- Reproducibility is not infrastructure. It is design.
- A system that only works in one environment is not a finished system.
- “It works on my machine” is an architectural failure.
- Builds must be reproducible.
- Tests must be deterministic.
- Hidden state, implicit configuration, and ambient behavior are design failures.
- Dependencies are part of the system, and their behavior must be controlled.
Reproducibility is how we know a system is correct — and how we make change safe.
IV. Intentional Change and Governance
Change is only safe when intent is explicit and scope is controlled.
- Nothing should change unless you intended it to.
- The difficulty of a change should match its scope, not its shape.
- Refactors are not neutral; they are changes and must be treated as such.
- Tests are not for coverage. They are for control.
- Dependency management is change management.
- If integration is deferred, risk is being accumulated.
- The most expensive upgrade is the one you postpone.
Governance exists to reduce ambiguity, not to add friction.
It is a delivery enabler, not a tax.
V. Reasoning and Judgment
Correct systems depend on correct reasoning.
- Tools do not replace judgment. They amplify it — for better or worse.
- Most execution problems are really system design problems.
- Sustainable systems are built by sustainable teams.
- You cannot scale reliability by hiring. You have to design it.
- If ownership is unclear, failure will be ambiguous.
- Changes must be auditable and documented so intent can be reconstructed later.
- Decisions should be explicit, inspectable, and challengeable.
Clear reasoning is not a communication preference.
It is a safety mechanism.
These principles are meant to be applied, not admired.
When they feel restrictive, that is usually the point.