Field notes · Est. 2019
Software engineering, AI, and architecture — written down while building.
I build backend systems and AI-assisted developer tools, and write down what I learn so I can find it again.
Featured · AI Engineering
Brooks’s Law and Multi-Agent Orchestration
Fred Brooks’s 1975 observation about late projects shows up again in multi-agent systems — only faster, cheaper, and easier to measure.
2026-10-28 · 3 min read
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Latest writing
All articles → 2026-10-14
AI Engineering
Parkinson’s Law in AI Workflows
Give an agent twenty steps and it will use twenty. Why budgets behave like deadlines, and how to set them from the outcome instead.
1 min read
· agents · llm · productivity
2026-09-30
AI Engineering
The Ringelmann Effect and Agent Productivity
A 19th-century rope-pulling experiment explains why output per agent drops as teams grow, and why visibility fixes more than headcount.
1 min read
· agents · productivity · orchestration
2026-09-12
Backend
Designing Reliable Background Jobs
Idempotency keys, retry budgets, and the transactional outbox — the three patterns that removed most of our duplicate-charge incidents.
1 min read
· reliability · background-jobs · dotnet
2026-08-26
Databases
PostgreSQL Full-Text Search in SaaS Applications
How far built-in full-text search goes in a multi-tenant product, and the three mistakes that made ours slow before it was fast.
1 min read
· postgres · search
2026-08-05
Data Engineering
Databricks Data Pipelines and Regression Testing
Pipeline tests that check schemas pass while the numbers quietly change. A practical setup for regression-testing data, not just code.
1 min read
· databricks · regression-testing
2026-07-18
Testing
Building AI-Assisted Playwright Workflows
Using an LLM to turn recorded sessions into readable Playwright tests — and the review checklist that keeps them from becoming flaky noise.
1 min read
· playwright · llm · developer-tools
Topics
AI Engineering 3 Backend 3 Databases 1 Data Engineering 1 Testing 1 Craft 0 Agents 3 LLMs 2 Orchestration 2 Productivity 3 Reliability 1 Background jobs 2
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An Nguyen
· Backend engineer, Ho Chi Minh City
I build backend systems and AI-assisted developer tools, and write down what I learn so I can find it again.