The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Phil Calçado

philcalcado.com

Phil Calçado on software architecture, distributed systems, and engineering leadership — helping ambitious companies punch above their weight through pragmatic architecture.

Software / engineering practiceDistributed systems / cloudEngineering management / careersAI / ML

’10’15’20’25
Posts
54 from 8 Jan 2008 to 17 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://philcalcado.com/feed.xml

2026 7

  1. Every Trick in the Book
  2. Classification Is (Often) All You Need
  3. Treat Escalations as Defects
  4. Writing AI-Assisted RFCs
  5. Cross-Team Pragmatics
  6. Nutrition Labels for AI
  7. AI and Brandolini’s Hell Loop

2025 2

  1. Building AI Products—Part II: Task-Oriented vs. Component-Oriented Pipelines
  2. AI is not the engineer we wanted, but it might be the one we need

2024 2

  1. Building AI Products—Part I: Back-end Architecture
  2. Copilotcalypse

2023 1

  1. Attention is All A Manager Needs

2021 1

  1. Five takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech

2020 1

  1. How I like to use OKRs

2019 2

  1. Guiding Principles for Developer Tools
  2. Some thoughts on GraphQL vs. BFF

2018 2

  1. A Structured RFC Process
  2. Layering Microservices

2017 6

  1. Buoyant
  2. Pattern: Service Mesh
  3. On leaving DigitalOcean
  4. Calçado's Microservices Prerequisites
  5. Pattern: Using Pseudo-URIs with Microservices
  6. Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects

2016 2

  1. On asking job candidates to code
  2. On joining DigitalOcean

2015 2

  1. The Back-end for Front-end Pattern (BFF)
  2. How we ended up with microservices.

2014 1

  1. Any Colour Will Do

2012 1

  1. Annoying RSpec: Dynamic Scope

2011 12

  1. Read The Dinossaurs!
  2. Better Functional Design Through TDD - Slides
  3. Slides: What I Have Learnt Working With Startups
  4. On The Testing In Clojure Debate
  5. An Afterthought: Leaving ThoughtWorks
  6. My Experience With TDD In Clojure
  7. Domain Change
  8. Clojure: Maps Are Not The Answer
  9. The Unit of Testing is the Unit of Maintainability
  10. Book Review: Let Over Lambda
  11. Book Review: Web Operations
  12. Rules Of Thumb Are Warning Bells

2010 8

  1. 2010 In Books
  2. New Blog Engine, New Host
  3. How to write a Repository
  4. Expressiveness Omnibus
  5. One Mock Per Test Considered Not Awesome
  6. Everyday Tales: We Call It Unit For A Reason
  7. Agile Architecture: 4 Common Strategies
  8. Nevermind Domain-Driven Design

2009 1

  1. What Is a Service?

2008 3

  1. Internal Data Transfer Objects
  2. Architecture Is About People
  3. Please Do Not Break Into!