Alex Rowan / Blog https://www.benbaert.com Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 UT Building Sustainable On-Call Rotations https://www.benbaert.com/blog/sustainable-oncall/index.html On-call design is organizational design.

Teams that run resilient rotations do three things well:

  1. Keep alert quality high.
  2. Hold blameless, actionable incident reviews.
  3. Budget dedicated reliability work each cycle.
]]> Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 UT https://www.benbaert.com/blog/sustainable-oncall/index.html Alex Rowan Writing Engineering RFCs People Actually Use https://www.benbaert.com/blog/writing-clear-engineering-rfcs/index.html Clear RFCs make tradeoffs legible. They should explicitly answer:

  • What outcome matters?
  • Which options were rejected and why?
  • What migration path is expected?

When documents answer these questions, review quality improves dramatically.

]]> Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UT https://www.benbaert.com/blog/writing-clear-engineering-rfcs/index.html Alex Rowan Platform as Product, Not Internal Ticket Queue https://www.benbaert.com/blog/platform-as-product/index.html A platform team creates leverage when it owns a real roadmap, explicit customer segments, and measurable adoption goals.

Without this, internal tooling becomes reactive infrastructure work with weak strategic impact.

]]> Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UT https://www.benbaert.com/blog/platform-as-product/index.html Alex Rowan Notes on Technical Leadership in Growth Stages https://www.benbaert.com/blog/notes-on-technical-leadership/index.html As organizations grow, ambiguity compounds faster than headcount. Technical leadership must shift from direct execution to operating systems:

  • explicit decision records
  • architecture reviews with clear ownership
  • predictable planning rituals

These mechanisms improve speed by reducing rework.

]]> Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UT https://www.benbaert.com/blog/notes-on-technical-leadership/index.html Alex Rowan Designing for Observability From Day One https://www.benbaert.com/blog/designing-for-observability/index.html The cheapest time to make software observable is before interfaces harden.

When teams define key business and platform signals while designing a service boundary, they ship faster and recover faster.

]]> Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UT https://www.benbaert.com/blog/designing-for-observability/index.html Alex Rowan Shipping AI Features Without Shipping Chaos https://www.benbaert.com/blog/shipping-ai-products/index.html Most AI roadmaps fail in the handoff between a promising demo and a reliable product surface.

Three habits close that gap:

  1. Define model behavior contracts early.
  2. Design graceful fallback behavior first.
  3. Instrument quality feedback loops before launch.

Treat AI work as product engineering, not isolated experimentation.

]]> Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UT https://www.benbaert.com/blog/shipping-ai-products/index.html Alex Rowan