The insights collected here come from hands-on work designing and building systems that evolve over time.
Across different projects and domains, similar structural patterns tend to reappear as systems move from ideas and prototypes toward long-lived use.
Documenting these patterns helps make early design pressures explicit — before they turn into constraints that are costly to undo.
Incremental Data Stream Accretion
How data streams added one by one — without an explicit model — quietly turn working systems into fragile architectures.
Prototype Lock-In
A failure pattern where successful prototypes are extended instead of re-designed, causing early assumptions to harden into constraints.
Infrastructure as an Afterthought
When early deployment decisions quietly harden into architectural constraints.
