The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Bit Byte Bit

bitbytebit.substack.com

Tech, Agile, Continuous Delivery. Click to read Bit Byte Bit, by Zarar Siddiqi, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Software / engineering practiceAI / MLSecurityElixir / ErlangEngineering management / careers

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
103 from 1 Jan 2001 to 29 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (21 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://bitbytebit.substack.com/feed

2026 16

  1. AI mass deskilling can be stopped
  2. As teams shrink, feedback loops change
  3. Explainer: How eMudhra’s weak keys caused internet chaos
  4. PHP2Shell Explained - 70% of sites affected
  5. What DeepSeek's $38 Means for Anthropic
  6. The system around the code
  7. Replacing prompts with loops: an example
  8. Speeding up Elixir test suites
  9. How AI Figures Out What You Mean - No Math Required
  10. Anthropic's Steganography Controversy Explained in Non-Technical Terms
  11. Enforcing Invariants in AI-Generated Code with ADRs and Contracts
  12. Four Ways to Plan Agent Work, and When to Switch
  13. Don't rely on instructions; use Agent Hooks to enforce guardrails
  14. Run a local coding model with pi and LM Studio
  15. Spec-Driven Development: From Vibe Coding to Structured Development
  16. It's a Great Time to be a Software Engineer

2025 8

  1. Scope discipline when AI makes building fast
  2. Embedding-Based Tool Selection for AI Agents
  3. React2Shell serves as good reminder why JavaScript is no fun
  4. Good riddance to Auth0 and social logins
  5. Pass on polymorphic tables
  6. Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
  7. Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
  8. I'm rejuvenated by the Elixir EU Conference

2024 11

  1. DORA: AI boosting productivity, hindering delivery
  2. Good software development habits
  3. Symptoms of a System in Stasis
  4. The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown
  5. Empowered Developers Write Clean Code
  6. Say no to no-reply emails
  7. From Meta to Microservices: Engineering Insights with Ian Gartley
  8. 36 productivity tips for developers
  9. Using ChatGPT to improve your code
  10. “What if I do nothing?”
  11. Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers

2023 1

  1. When deployments are easy, code becomes simpler

2022 14

  1. Test Driven Development: Looking Past the Branding Problem
  2. Applying Second Order Thinking in Analytics
  3. You don't need user stories
  4. OKRs: The remedy to fixed date, fixed scope projects
  5. Increasing integration test quality
  6. Waterfall Design
  7. Kafka vs Traditional Message Queue
  8. Agility in the construction industry
  9. Driving change by sifting through old emails
  10. Customer Hacquisition
  11. Agile isn't faster, but you're done sooner
  12. Semantics Misunderstandings Cause Integration Risk
  13. UI Tests: The Illusion of Quality at the Cost of Quality
  14. 5 Story Mapping Anti-Patterns

2021 13

  1. Simple Practices to Improve Software Development Teams
  2. Leading Indicators
  3. Using Gherkin for Acceptance Criteria
  4. The Backend and Frontend Story Divide
  5. Avoiding Duplication in State Management
  6. Mocking and Spying with Jest and TypeScript
  7. Evaluating Metrics
  8. Shock Doctrine
  9. Waiting for a Crisis
  10. OS Privacy Controls
  11. On Estimation
  12. On Planning in Kanban
  13. Is Scrum suitable for complicated bug fixes?

2020 16

  1. Architectural Tension
  2. Dissonance of Using Functional Concepts in Non-functional Stacks
  3. The Definition of News Has Been Legally Changed
  4. TDSB Survey Results Can Be Misleading
  5. A Short Analysis of an Analysis: YouTube Trending Videos
  6. Mining for Side-Effects in Complex Adaptive Systems
  7. Serverless Architectures and Storing First
  8. Autonomy, Maturity and Chaos
  9. Compliance Metrics
  10. Dissorienting Dilemma
  11. Women's Rights in Islam
  12. The Continuous Delivery Podcast
  13. BusyBusyBusy
  14. FakeDone
  15. TheDigitalOrg
  16. TeamAroundTool

2019 10

  1. Feature Toggle Design Patterns for Front-End Development in Typescript
  2. Contract Based Testing with JUnit5, Pact, WireMock and Spring
  3. List of Coaching Questions
  4. Inferring interfaces in statically typed languages based on object shape
  5. Embedding quality in software through slack
  6. Impactful Refactorings: Replace Conditional with Polymorphism
  7. Examples of the hidden wastes of software development
  8. The Tricky Business of Managing Technical Debt
  9. Drawbacks of Pull Request Reviews
  10. Prototyping can get in the way of software delivery

2018 2

  1. A Theory of User Story Sizing
  2. The reason for prep meetings, adding more people “in the loop” etc.

2017 8

  1. A Model for Measuring Productivity
  2. The Enterprise Ecosystem Already Exists — They’re called EUCs
  3. Giving Enterprise Innovation a Fighting Chance
  4. Giving Enterprise Innovation a Fighting Chance
  5. Framing Back Office initiatives
  6. Reducing friction in structures
  7. Improving architecture decision velocity
  8. We must recognize unplanned work

2015 3

  1. I ain’t got no standards
  2. The Phoenix Project, i.e., The Goal for IT
  3. Let's retire Agile

2001 1

  1. Monday January 01, 2001