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Saeed Habibi

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Activated Thinker

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Saeed Habibi

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Jul 10

The Activation Gap, Part 1: I Can Feel Something Is Wrong. I Just Can’t Say What.

Why I feel a problem long before I can name it, and why the delay between the two is where the expensive mistakes live.

A single photographic developing tray seen from above, the moment a latent image is surfacing on the paper inside it. Most of the print is still an even, undecided grey-blue field: forms present but not yet legible, the picture withheld.

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CodeToDeploy

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Saeed Habibi

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Jan 20

Information Asymmetry: Why Your Best Technical Decisions Feel Like Guesses

Every technical decision of consequence is made with incomplete information. This is not a bug in the process. This is the process.

The Architecture of Uncertainty: Making Technical Decisions with Incomplete Data

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Saeed Habibi

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Jan 28

Why Events Are Architecture, Not Implementation

The shift from entity-centric to event-centric thinking changes everything about what your systems can do

From Entity-Centric to Event-Centric: A Mental Model Shift

Saeed Habibi

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20h ago

Every Law on This List Has a Production Incident Behind It

Conway, Brooks, and Hyrum each wrote down a failure they had watched repeat. The sentences survived. The conditions did not.

Two identical glass cartridge fuses lie parallel on empty near-white ground, set on a gentle diagonal in the upper right of the frame. Each is a slim clear tube with a faint cool blue-gray tint, closed at both ends by plain metal caps, and each carries the same thin band of small printed marks circling the glass at the same position, identical on both, abstract and not legible.

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6d ago

The 56 Laws of Software Engineering: Where to Start Based on What’s Hurting You Right Now

Six situations, a dozen laws, and the two you actually need when something breaks.

A long, uniform row of identical filing folders or index-card dividers, viewed top-down, receding toward the back of the frame. All fifty-some folders sit flush in the row, evenly spaced, uniform cool blue-gray, none differentiated from any other. Two folders, positioned apart from each other in the row rather than adjacent, are pulled slightly forward and tilted just enough to break the row’s flatness.

Saeed Habibi

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Sep 14

What Profiling, Cleaning, Defining, and Charting Turned Out to Have in Common

A fifth sitting with the same invoice log, where one ordinary question, run through all four prior checkpoints, tested whether the four…

A single continuous strip of ground, viewed from directly above, divided into four adjacent zones of clearly different texture running left to right: a zone of loose scattered gravel, a zone of an even tile grid, a zone of soft rippled sand, and a zone of smooth unbroken stone. Each zone is rendered in the same cool blue-gray family but with a genuinely different surface pattern, so the four are legible as different kinds of ground rather than four shades of one thing.

Saeed Habibi

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Sep 11

Every AI-Assisted Codebase I’ve Reviewed Has the Same Bus Factor Problem. It’s Invisible.

Commit history tracks who typed the code. It doesn’t track who could rebuild it. Three questions that surface the gap a contributor graph…

Six identical small stacked blocks stand in a single evenly spaced row on a plain white surface, uniform in height, width, and cool blue-gray color, like six matched pillars or chips. All six are structurally identical from the outside, no visible differences in size, spacing, or finish. Five of the six stacks are solid straight through, catching a normal soft shadow beneath them like any opaque object. The sixth stack, positioned naturally within the row rather than singled out spatially.

Saeed Habibi

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Sep 8

I Tracked the Behavior. I Never Traced the Loop.

The fourth case file in Installed, Not Running: explaining how feedback loops work and tracing my own turned out to be different skills.

Two identical vertical tally counters, simple tick-mark structures logging count, stand side by side on near-white ground. Both have the same number of ticks, rendered in flat cool blue-gray, evenly spaced. Beneath the left counter, the ground is flat and undifferentiated.

Saeed Habibi

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Sep 4

I Spent the Better Part of a Year Rewriting What the Old System Already Knew.

Rewrites don’t inherit the fixes the old system already paid for. They have to earn their own.

Two identical bound ledger books lie open side by side on a plain surface, spines parallel, pages fully visible from above. The left ledger is older: its cover corners have softened and rounded from years of handling, one page along the outer edge shows a thin, neatly mended tear line, and the printed rule lines running down each page carry a second layer of marks alongside them, notes added later in a slightly different ink, denser near the middle of the book where the most-used accounts sit.

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CodeToDeploy

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Saeed Habibi

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Sep 3

Every Senior Engineer I Know Has Shipped a Version of This Mistake.

This isn’t a failure story. It’s a stage most engineers pass through once.

Two cylindrical industrial storage tanks stand side by side on empty white ground, identical in construction: the same plain metal shell, the same narrow vertical gauge strip on the front face marking fill level.

Saeed Habibi

Saeed Habibi

Senior Software Engineer sharing lessons on architecture, system design, and the mindset behind building scalable software.

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