For depth-first engineers - the ones who go down, not around.
AI is moving the easy work down the stack; the judgment above it stays yours. This publication builds the three literacies it can’t replace - Coding, Systems, and AI Literacy - from first principles.
Meet Ania
Engineering Manager at Nokia
Ania has spent over a decade between business and engineering - as Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Project Manager on software delivered for operators worldwide. As an Engineering Manager at Nokia she now builds and runs the teams that ship it. She speaks at industry conferences and mentors people moving into tech.
Meet Kuba
Backend Engineer
I started at Nokia on LTE and LTE Advanced - ultra-low-latency C++, where a microsecond budget is a real constraint. Then Sabre, building the distributed platforms behind flight booking, where double-booking and consistency are the whole game. At Pegasystems I built real-time decisioning and AI for enterprises. Now I work on cloud-native BSS - the billing, charging, and commerce systems that run behind mobile operators. Across all four the pattern held: the value moved up the stack, to the judgment a model can’t make. That is what I write about here.
Why subscribe?
Every post takes one idea and builds it from first principles, from real production systems - not toy examples. You leave understanding the mechanism, not just the name.
Free subscribers get the primers across Coding, Systems, and AI Literacy, plus the intuition and high-level design behind every deep dive.
Paid subscribers get the full deep dives - the production stories, the trade-off analysis, and runnable code and notebooks you can reproduce. That is the part a model can’t hand you.
New posts arrive on a regular cadence, straight to your inbox.
