A Quick Hello

Welcome to the first issue of Dev Notes. I'm glad you're here.

This is meant to be a conversation, not a broadcast. Reply anytime with questions, thoughts, or tools you think I should check out. I'd love to hear from you.

At work, we're deep into H1 2026 planning. As a staff engineer, I get tagged on everything: one-pagers, technical design docs, estimates, Gantt charts, endless Slack DMs. It piles up fast.

When the notifications stack up, I have to remind myself that the world isn't burning. Most requests can wait until after my next meeting. Or tomorrow. Or Monday. Some things just can wait.

The hardest part of technical planning? Finding the middle ground between the "perfect" architecture and what actually fits the business goals. A good strategy lives in that middle space. Too ideal and it never ships. Too pragmatic and you're rebuilding it in six months.

I've been updating a service template repo lately, pulling in tooling and best practices. But not everything belongs in a template. Some things should live as packages or shared libraries instead. Still figuring out what goes where, but it's a useful thought experiment.

Tomorrow's Podcast Episode

Topic: Fancy Turkish Coffee, Plugins, and Structured Output

We talked about staying with Claude despite GPT 5.1's coding improvements, new structured output features in Prism for Anthropic and Gemini, and plans to add observability for tracking tool usage and performance metrics.

Subscribe at slightlycaffeinated.fm

Links & Resources

cc-sdd - Spec-driven development tool with EARS requirement numbering. I haven't used it yet, but the EARS numbering system looks solid. It organizes requirements in a way that AI models parse well. Might work this into my planning prompts.

Do/Try/Consider: Product Feedback at Asana - This feedback framework could fix a problem I have. As a staff engineer, my "ideas" sometimes land as "do this now" when that's not what I mean. The Do/Try/Consider structure makes intent clear. Do means required. Try means suggested. Consider means optional. I'm going to start using this with my team.

That's it for this week. Reply with any tools or resources you think I should check out.

-Chris