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2026

Why I Was Wrong About Books: How the Unit of Work Pattern Saved My Database

The Builder's Dilemma

A while ago, I became anti-books. As a developer, I went all in on building. I avoided anything that felt like analysis paralysis. I wanted to be smart by actually knowing how to build stuff, not by reading about building stuff.

Don't get me wrong. This is mostly the right approach. Doers and builders win. But here's the problem: you don't know what you don't know.

Vocabulary Drift: The Naming Problem Slowing Down Your AI Projects

Your deployment pipeline is only as fast as your slowest miscommunication.


Last quarter I was leading the architecture for a GenAI document processing system.

The technical work was fast. We had RAG pipelines running in days. Prototypes that impressed stakeholders. A team that could iterate quickly.

But something was broken. Users felt like we were moving at a really slow pace. Stakeholders were frustrated. Every meeting felt like we were speaking different languages.

The problem wasn't our code. It was our words.