Sandor Nagy

Unpopular opinion: most architecture diagrams in enterprise companies are theatre. While my system diagrams usually live on the team rooms' whiteboards for years.

I almost didn't build this lifesaver.

For years, every time I joined a new engagement, I rebuilt the same architecture artefacts from scratch. C4 diagrams. ADRs. Cost breakdowns. Security layers.

Most engineering teams think documentation is a tax they pay at the end of a project.

It's actually a multiplier lever they're giving up at the start.

Most digital projects fail because nobody shares the same mental image in the team. I would argue this is the only problem that kills more projects and budgets than any other out there.

We have seen and run large transformation offices. The promise of organization wide unlock of 2-3x returns, agility of business practices, and so many other promises turn out to be empty after a year of hard push. Hard doesn't mean you shouldn't do, just it means you need different approach to success.

I said that genAI is like 3D printing. Now I think it is more like a chocolate bar.

Stay with me for a second.

Years of hard work, dozens if not hundreds of exceptional talent, yet your digital transformation fizzles out with no to minimum revenue increment to show for.

Stone, paper, scrissors. Chess. Most overused techniques.

Instead of the promised research focus, I had a different mood and creative energies lately turning me back to the new combat mechanics. I scaffolded a simple block-out in ThreeJS integrated into my demo to start visualizing this experience and it made me think more deeply.

Previously talked about the major concepts I am thinking to merge for a compelling, lived in world:

• game theory and crisis bargaining,
• escalation ladder.

In this week’s devlog I wanted to address two things with the upcoming game:

• an overview of the important alien races in the big picture,
• and to introduce the main race to contrast humans against.

For years I was trying to find a way how I can drive a deeply engaging story in any type of video games. While the GOATed “Detroit: Become Human” delivers a core storytelling experience, not much happens outside of the story beats in terms of gaming: move, run, crouch, search and basic interact. No combat, no higher engagements. It makes sense though. Introducing all those elements bring the interaction space level not manageable by a branching storyline.

If you have tried my pre-alpha demo at demo.perseuspatrol.com, you noticed that one major component is missing from the game loop: tactical combat.

Making an entire galaxy feel like a living world is a tall challenge. I can not achieve this by brute forcing asset creation, but only by creating a system, or multiple game systems. These system have to make it feel like there are more than one intelligence is at play and that you are only a part of a bigger thing. Yet give enough leeway that you can interact with it and get expected results, not random disconnected events. Otherwise the game would break its own narrative.

Tricks to use in your next slide deck swaying executive decisions like a pro. This time I talk about:

• chevrons and to represent dimensions for easy comparision,
• strategy temple used by all management consultants,
• portfolio view that elevates your executive presence,
• objectives and status to focus only on the decisions that matters,
• how to bring deeply technical topic to execs like infrastructure decisions,
• basic visual eye-candies, like graphs, icons, even font sizing matters throughout your document.

Crossing a vast empty space right next to our own dear Sol system is the route of Perseus. The first Greek hero slayed and slayed monsters of the deep darkness on his trail. Humans told the tale of saving Andromeda from a sea monster, Cetus. What really happened, who knows thousands of years later. If only Perseus would walk amongst us today…

In the book I am still working on, the Giant has suffered a total hull-loss with tens of thousands souls still on-board. The ensuing years of investigations, clean-up and litigations led to uncover a conspiracy pushing the colony worlds to secede from the Federation.

Over 2024 to early 2025 I wrote my first book. I planned doing that for over a decade. Created endless notes of my sci-fi world, its history, the outlines of story ideas I want to tell. One thing still didn’t happen over long time, and that was the most basic thing: to actually write.

ℹ️Bridge into the universe of Giant of the Stars “Hey, sweetie! How was the flight?” — Mathe mirrored his daughter’s smiley into the small screen hanging out of his bracelet.

Long before space travel became available, way before it was even a necessity for humans to thrive, on Earth, just a family taking their vacation.

“Long and boring… when will you join us?” — pounding behind the smiley, eyes brightening up as forgetting the first topic already.

After an energizing discussion with László Kóródi in a previous post, I am interested more to delve into tech debt topics, first, how much is fine?

Understanding different expertise is key to build great teams.

Maximizing productivity and impact starts with the morning.

Good affordable senior content is far and few in between on the internet, don't you think?

3-tiers of speed in digital delivery leads to differences in product teams

Only a handful of professional books transformed my mindset fundamentally in my life and career, here are my top 6.

You know, we focus on growth now. Or, we pivot later. What is the common thread?

There are those who believe in Moon-shots. Even if you miss, and reach just 10%, it still is impressive. In a way, I agree with the sentiment.

In my opinion, we missed the true scaling microservices can solve: human side of engineering.

In the chase of speed, time to market, what would you sacrifice?

“You should have known what ABCD stands for!”

One way to improve your business, organization, impact, outcomes, everything, is to improve your colleagues, peers, team mates.

Long, long time ago I deployed an e-commerce website. On a Friday evening. Manually uploading files to a server.

I did not write about my carreer fuel, coding and architecture so far.

Have you heard about “unlearning”? This is when we have come to a conclusion, a new habit or rule that we apply, ultimately turns out to be subpar or sometimes even wrong.

One way to decentralize command is the UNODIR.

CODEC instead of MECE.

In complex domains such as digital products, teams with shared consciousness will always dominate silos.

Stress may be one of the most widespread core factor in developing health issues. No data for it, not my area, but look around in the developed world’s statistics. Either it will be its own category, or the medical issues listed, many have stress as core component.

I had and continue to have the privilege to work with great colleagues. How do you know, though, that your colleague is great? I was thinking a lot, tried to remember the best or smartest solutions anyone came up with.

You follow test driven development. Code coverage is excellent. Yet everything is buggy. Quality of the code is terrible. What is wrong?

We hear a lot about how long hours some work. Some jobs are indeed grueling and outcome has linear connection to time input. Creative jobs defy that logic.

When will we finally understand that there is a negative correlation between time and productivity in creative type jobs?

Junior, senior, staff, principal engineers. Have you ever thought into how these are defined?

I like to read quotes of famous, successful people just like the next person.

Yet, with the prevalence of these quotes, we may miss the true meaning in most of them.

Ever wondered why we call it software?

We do miss good fundamentals. In digital products, often could sound a feedback, simplified into “return to fundamentals.” Have you got a similar feedback before, and could not make sense of it?

Have you seen someone being in the flow? When the world around them is irrelevant, they are so focused and productive, you can’t even imagine how they do what they do.

A detailed plan, sheets of paper (or endless digital canvas) laid in front of you. How much it is outdated? Can you even guess?

Are you a planner or an improviser? Spending a thousand hours to perfect a single hour of actions? Winging it for a thousand hours to never look back after all?

Popular to bash on daily standups as a waste of time. Yet, my experience, after literally thousands of standups run in half the world, is contradictory to that.

I see people taking end of year retrospectives. Some put it in numbers of impact. I thought to join in for fun. Not to boast. Though maybe a little bit, we are all proud of our achievements, aren’t we?

While I was on a bit of a career pause, still did a few milestones I am super proud of:

Have you had a meeting where everyone sat silently? Or just a majority never spoke. While silence in itself is not just disengagement, it may be one of the symptoms. However disengagement is just a symptom too.

“Computer’s work with smoke. If smoke comes out, it doesn’t work anymore.”

Old joke I really like. Haven’t thought of it why. Actually, it represents oversimplification and its dangers really well for me.

We are all different. Personalities, preferences for work, and how we engage the world. Personally I really like writing, it makes me feel… good, fulfilled, relaxed? I don’t know how to describe it. A word-salad would not be enough to convey it.

While advanced analytics techniques enable personalization on a scale, machine learning and decision support systems aid professionals every day. While all over the net, same tech is used to hunt for clicks, views and engagement.

If it is not obvious why need to make a decision the moment you do, question what makes it important now?

Be impactful, focus on the impact, this doesn’t bring enough impact. I am sure you heard these words before, as a comment, feedback, or a passing sentence in a meeting. And they are deep and right.

Another often repeated sentiment around here are the are the “trust your team” and “don’t micromanage”. And as oversimplified statements, I fully support.

Anyone else has trouble finding quality results on search engines?

“It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me.” - is the Naval Ravikant quote stuck with me. Agree or disagree with him, he has interesting points on life lessons. This one is rarely realized by people, I believe it is on point though.

Often heard advice to find your passion. I myself said it many times to individuals. Yet if you think for a bit, it is not really actionable, is it? I mean, how someone finds their passion? What is passion even mean?

The usual meme comes up all the time, the leader pulls the stone in front of their people while the boss sits on it. A funny and interesting reduction, that looks well in lists of wise metaphors.

Once I read somewhere, those who have the ability to hold multiple contradictory statements in mind, will be more successful.

Do you remember when you read a book, a fiction so good, you immersed into and just forgot about the world for a while?

Just remember, if you have a hammer, all problems look like nails. Things like “fullstack engineer” might not mean the same thing for all of us, yet “learning new things outside of your comfort zone” does and it is a more practical advice. It will make you better in your existing expertise.

A science fiction short story​

Guilt of the Innocents​

It was years ago. Earth years, mind you. I know, most colonies dropped the date system inherited from mother-world. This was the dark ages again, actually the dark matter age, as how it will be called later.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet.

A science fiction short story​

Score of a lifetime​

From the moment I remember anything, I felt happiness. Like what I was doing, I was born for it. First memory I had, looked like a game. A red spot in the middle, a dark line, a cross over it.

Balance was the key. As I moved my legs, the cross moved up or down. I felt better if it was perfectly on top of the red dot. The sadness hurts when it wasn’t.

How many of you were sitting on meetings or other ways argued about how to do the email validation correctly?

TLDR: simple answer, DON’T do it, does not worth the effort, there is only one way, send and email and see if the user clicks a link in it, that is it.

Chapter 5 of “Digital Products from zero to hero”

What is in this chapter:

• in previous chapter we reviewed what is a good user story, how it looks like and how it can describe a valuable increment, now we will solve that described problem from the technical perspective,
• as we are solving for the problem, we need to define the space we are working in, called the architecture of the application, we select the so called tech stack for this project and discuss the different decisions,
• we take a quick thought on how the application should behave holistically, and include not just the user’s perspective.

In this third and final article in this series, I continue to break down each points from Vinod Khosla and unpack the unique challenges attaining such “possible future”, if you want to reread his points or just opened this article, here is his presentation:

I am not going to fully reiterate his points here, just focusing on the title and my reaction, let’s dive in for this round:

In this second article, I continue to break down each points from Vinod Khosla and unpack the unique challenges attaining such “possible future”, if you want to reread his points or just opened this article, here is his presentation:

I am not going to fully reiterate his points here, just focusing on the title and my reaction, let’s dive in for this round:

Chapter 4 of “Digital Products from zero to hero”

What is in this chapter:

• what is a user story, how to write a good one your team will cherish,
• you will understand parts of a good user story like the acceptance criteria,
• a good starting structure for you and your team’s backlog and what is beyond user stories.

I recently started following Ethan Evans, his intriguing takes on AI and wise advices on senior management are always a curious read of mine. He took part of the TED Conference 2024, a prestigious event I can just wish to be part of ever.

However, an article about Vinod Khosla’s presentation grabbed my attention thoroughly. As a technocrat myself, being in the software engineering business for over a decade and a half, an avid reader and consumer of engineering and entrepreneurial topics, and being an optimist myself, the article contained claims I could not stop thinking about. Read here Ethan’s notes for a quick overview:

Chapter 3 of “Digital Products from zero to hero”

What is in this chapter:

• the importance, why and how to imagine the user journey in a prototyping tool,
• basic techniques and starting point in Figma for anyone,
• how to think about your user and to make decisions of the starting, simple journey.

Chapter 2 of “Digital Products from zero to hero”

What is in this chapter:

• blueprint of a digital product development process to follow, even when you are a solo developer;
• practical advice and ideas, my personal way of working learned throughout the years of experience with focus on kick-off the project in Miro (however same flow can be implemented in any modern tools with your personal customization, like Jira, Trello, Linear, etc.)

What is in this post:​

• The story behind what motivated me to develop my own app to address a complex travel problem
• How to break down a complex idea to its core and validate the assumptions with minimal effort to help ensure you are on the right path. This thinking can be applied broadly to not only personal but also business problems you are trying to solve.
• Python code examples for the solution to follow along and experiment with the solution yourself (note: does not cover Deepnote and how to set up your Amadeus API account)