I build software.
And keep
asking why.

Probably my favorite book. In the three brothers, Smerdyakov, and their father, I see something of almost everyone. The family feels like a whole world of competing desires, beliefs, and contradictions.

I recognize myself in Dmitri’s passion and in Ivan’s intellectual struggles. That tension between what we feel and what we can reason our way through is what stays with me. I don’t read these characters as people entirely separate from one another. I see parts of myself in them.

Faust’s search for fulfillment feels very close to me. There is always another question, another experience, another thing he believes might finally be enough.

I’m constantly asking questions and looking for something that challenges me. I recognize that restlessness in the book: the desire to keep going, and the difficulty of ever feeling satisfied. I’m still thinking about what that means for my own life.

I love how this book exposes the assumptions we bring to the world. Through Don Quixote’s dreams and misreadings, I find myself thinking about money, the way we treat other people, and the stories that guide our lives.

What interests me is how much it reveals about our own society. We all carry an idea of how the world works. Reading Cervantes makes me question where mine comes from, and what I might be getting wrong.

This book helped me think about how to divide a system according to what matters most to the business. Identifying the core domain makes it clearer where we should put most of our energy, and which supporting parts need a different level of investment.

That distinction matters to me because engineering effort is limited. Before choosing how to build something, I want to understand which part of the problem actually gives the business its value.

This gave me a foundation for thinking about architecture: different styles, the qualities they support, and metrics for evaluating architecture and code quality.

It gave me more than a collection of patterns. I gained a way to compare choices and ask what fits a particular project. I don’t expect one architecture to be the answer every time. I want to understand enough to make the choice deliberately.

This book taught me the fundamentals behind how large enterprise applications scale. It helped me look beyond an individual service and think about the data, coordination, and reliability of the system around it.

I value that foundation because growth changes the questions an application has to answer. Understanding the underlying ideas gives me a better place to start when those questions become difficult.