Kris Drouet
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An on-call rotation that keeps burning people out is usually reporting an architecture problem, because pages cluster at the seams where services are tightly coupled, and adding engineers to the schedule divides that load without reducing it. Total page volume is a design number. Per-person load … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 LLM evaluation is a repeatable scored test suite for model output, run against a fixed set of real examples, so quality becomes a number you can watch instead of a feeling somebody had in a demo. Build it before the feature, not after the incident. Thirty … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A dual engineering career ladder fails when the staff track matches management on pay but hands staff engineers no real decisions, because the title then reads as a consolation prize for engineers who were not chosen to manage. Two MIT researchers documented that failure in 1985. … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Brooks’s law says adding people to a late software project makes it later, because new engineers borrow time from the people already doing the work and every added person multiplies the conversations needed to stay aligned. I call that combined cost the coordination tax. Teams that … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A technical due diligence checklist covers the six areas acquirers actually check, which are architecture, code health, security and open-source licensing, delivery, infrastructure cost, and people risk. The list is predictable. The weighting is not. Most of what changes a price surfaces in the management interviews, … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Choose between onshore, nearshore, and offshore by counting usable overlap hours, not hourly rates, because overlap sets how many decisions your distributed engineering team can close per day. Four to six shared hours is the practical floor for work with unsettled requirements. Below is the row … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Cloud cost optimization is an architecture problem first, because how data moves, what runs idle, how long logs live, and where services split set a cost floor that no discount or rightsizing tool can get beneath. Tools trim the top of the bill. The design decides … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Idempotent API design means a client can safely resend the same request, by accident, timeout, or automatic retry, and the server guarantees it only happens once. That guarantee has to survive the network doing something ugly, which, statistically, it will. The alert didn’t say duplicate charge. … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 SOC 2 compliance changes four things for engineering teams day to day: every production change needs a documented approval trail, access reviews become a recurring calendar item, logging can’t get switched off to chase a bug, and someone owns evidence collection as a real job. That’s … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An incident review changes behavior when it ends with three things: a written timeline of what people actually knew, action items carrying a named owner and a date, and no defendant. The rest of the template exists to make those three things happen. I wrote a … Read more
