Writing about infrastructure, open source, and more.https://chuckmcandrew.com/en-ushttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/culture-is-how-teams-become-excellent/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/culture-is-how-teams-become-excellent/Excellent engineers come from excellent teams, not the other way around. A story about building one on purpose, and watching it outlast the people who built it.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/dont-let-a-bad-deploy-teach-the-wrong-lesson/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/dont-let-a-bad-deploy-teach-the-wrong-lesson/An incident always teaches you something. The trick is not learning the wrong lesson. A story about a failed self-service deploy and what it actually proved.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/context-not-control/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/context-not-control/When I first led a team, I made every decision run through me. A manager set me straight: my job was never to make the decisions, it was to make sure decisions got made.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/cognitive-bandwidth-is-the-constraint/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/cognitive-bandwidth-is-the-constraint/Developer productivity isn't limited by effort or typing speed. It's limited by how much an engineer can hold in their head at once, and protecting that is most of the job.Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/platform-engineering-for-human-beings/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/platform-engineering-for-human-beings/The job of a technical leader isn't to make every decision. It's to build the systems that let good engineering happen without them in the room.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/in-praise-of-inefficiency/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/in-praise-of-inefficiency/Resilient systems need inefficiency built in. Seedlings, deadlifts, and what happens to engineers who never learn to struggle.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/centaur-model-human-ai-collaboration/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/centaur-model-human-ai-collaboration/The best use of AI isn't vibe coding or refusing the tool. It's pair programming in the deepest sense, where both parties bring something the other can't.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/threat-modeling-for-developers/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/threat-modeling-for-developers/Security has a baseline that everyone should meet. Above that, the right level of security depends on your threat model, and that's a business decision, not a technical one.Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/dry-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/dry-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/Most developers learn DRY as 'don't duplicate code.' The original principle is about something deeper: every piece of knowledge should have a single source of truth.Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/rebuilding-with-astro/https://chuckmcandrew.com/blog/rebuilding-with-astro/Why I ditched Hugo after years and rebuilt my personal site from scratch with Astro, Tailwind CSS v4, and DaisyUI v5.Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT