Hi, I'm Eng Abdalla.

I'm a software engineer who spends most of my time in the space between architecture and implementation — the decisions that are cheap to make early and expensive to unmake later. I write this site to think in public about that space: what made a system easy to change, what made it brittle, and why.

My focus is backend and platform engineering — APIs, data modelling, and the infrastructure that holds a product together as it grows past the point where any one person understands all of it. I care about developer experience as much as user experience, because a codebase that's painful to work in eventually shows up as a product that's painful to use.

My engineering philosophy: simplicity is a discipline, not a starting point you drift away from; every abstraction has to earn its keep, and most don't; boring technology, used well, beats novel technology used carelessly; and software is read far more than it's written, so I optimize for the reader.

Outside of code, I'm especially interested in the growth of technology and engineering talent across Africa, and in what it takes to build products for infrastructure and connectivity conditions that differ from the defaults most tooling assumes.