The Thinking Builder

Letters on building better software

By Alex Kondov

My career-long struggle with picking challenge or beauty

Why I keep trading a stable career path for a detour in doing beautiful work

Jun 20 • Alex Kondov

I'm not excited about new toys

A short rant on new model releases and why I don't follow new tool development

Jun 10 • Alex Kondov

Clocks in distributed systems

Ordering events in a system where every machine keeps its own time

Jun 1 • Alex Kondov

The AI cool off is slowly starting

Maybe it's pricing, maybe it's common sense, but the industry is course correcting on the importance of good engineering.

May 26 • Alex Kondov

Announcing The Thinking Builder Book

Letters on common sense in the age of thinking machines

May 14 • Alex Kondov

I am the bottleneck

It's hard to understand code when it's written at scale, but maybe formal verification can help with that.

May 4 • Alex Kondov

Finding beauty in consensus protocols

The peculiar story of the Paxos algorithm, how Leslie Lamport makes complex ideas fun, and academic papers as an interface.

Apr 10 • Alex Kondov

On AI Fatigue

I turned from a composer to a DJ and it's exhausting

Mar 20 • Alex Kondov