Master the senior engineer's most distinctive written forms. Write documents that survive personnel turnover, capture the why of decisions, and let teams scale beyond what fits in any one head.
Your migrations directory is already a chronological ADR archive for the schema: every migration is a dated, ordered, signed architectural decision, and migrations that name the why (AddIndexToUsersEmailForLoginPerformance) are good ADRs while MigrationFromTaskAbc123 is a bad one. The generated schema file is the README equivalent — the squashed current state a newcomer reads to understand now, not the historical sequence. And reversibility is the consequences discipline: the moment you can't auto-reverse a change is the moment a normal change became architecturally significant — that's the moment to write the real ADR. Every decision worth recording is one you've thought about how to undo.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
Here's what nobody admits about design docs in big-company engineering culture: many of them aren't written to make a decision. They're written to make a decision defensible — ins…
If your trajectory points toward architecture work — and for most senior ICs it does — the next five years of your career will be defined less by the code you write and more by th…
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Important
Approach: Important
Approach: Important
Approach: Reference
Approach: Reference
Three real documents, for actual situations in your current work — not exercises:
10 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.