Engineering Culture

Managing a remote engineering team sounds straightforward until you have developers in Lahore, designers in Lisbon, and a client in Los Angeles. That is a 13-hour spread. When your backend engineer in Pakistan starts their day, your frontend developer in Portugal is having lunch, and

In 2023, we shipped an internal tool at Harbor Software that had a particularly unhelpful error message: “Operation failed.” No error code. No context. No suggestion of what to do next. Within the first week, our support channel had 47 messages that were all variations

Access control is one of those features that seems simple in the elevator pitch and complex in the implementation. “Users have roles, roles have permissions, check the permission before doing the thing.” That covers about 20% of the real design. The remaining 80% involves permission

We migrated Harbor Software’s infrastructure to Terraform three years ago. In that time, we have managed over 400 resources across three AWS accounts, handled two major Terraform version upgrades, and recovered from exactly one state file corruption incident that cost us a full day of

CI/CD pipelines at large companies are maintained by dedicated platform engineering teams with six-figure infrastructure budgets. At a 4-person startup, you are the platform engineering team, the SRE team, and the development team—simultaneously. Your CI budget is whatever GitHub Actions’ free tier provides, and every

Large language models are remarkably capable and fundamentally limited. They can generate fluent, contextually appropriate text on almost any topic, but they cannot access information beyond their training data cutoff. Ask GPT-3 about a document you wrote last week, and it will either confess ignorance

Technical debt is the most abused metaphor in software engineering. Every shortcut gets labeled “tech debt.” Every framework migration gets justified as “paying down tech debt.” The term has become so elastic it is almost meaningless. At Harbor Software, we have been building for about