Ben Sutherland
Head of Engineering & CTO
Socials
Notes on engineering leadership, architecture, and the craft of shipping reliable software.
Security bolted on at the end is theatre. Treated as a design constraint from the first boundary โ threat-modelled early, safe path as the default โ it's what actually reduces risk.
Buying everyone AI licences isn't a strategy. A real one decides where AI creates leverage, how you vet the tools, the guardrails around them, and how you'll know it worked.
The core technical-leadership skill isn't picking technologies โ it's converting vague, shifting business intent into a direction clear enough to act on and cheap enough to change.
When a team grows, decision-making breaks before the code does. Scale decisions โ encode judgement into standards, paved paths, and culture so autonomy stays safe.
LLM coding tools amplify the engineer using them โ most useful when you already know what you want, and quietly corrosive where a team leans on them to think.
The demo is the easy part. Production LLM systems live or die on evals, guardrails, and the failure modes that never appear in a demo โ engineer the system around the model, not the prompt.
The build-vs-buy binary misses the option most teams actually take โ bend. A framework for deciding by constraint and reversibility instead of ideology.
A decision framework for session-based vs token-based auth โ revocation, topology, and the cookie and CSRF details that decide it in practice.
Turning a manual PDF slog into an automated pipeline โ with de-identification, k-anonymity, and data governance designed in from the start, not bolted on.
When running compute on Cloudflare while keeping identity and data in Azure is the right call โ and the integration realities that decision brings.
Matching a photo to a fixed palette is a small lesson in a problem that shows up everywhere โ approximating a continuous space with a discrete one, using a metric that models the human eye.