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KoladeBuilds is the tech platform of Kolade Oluwadare, a Software Engineer focused on reliable mobile and backend systems.

I share insights on scalable architecture, engineering trade-offs, and real-world system design.

31/08/2026

AI has made it ridiculously easy to generate code.

And I’m starting to think our next engineering problem won’t be writing enough code.

It’ll be dealing with all the code we can now produce.

More PRs to review. More dependencies to keep track of. More abstractions. More surface area. More code that works but nobody on the team fully understands.

The old bottleneck was often getting something built.

Now, getting something built might be the easy part.

The harder part is deciding what deserves to exist in the first place, reviewing what was generated, and keeping the codebase understandable six months later.

I’m not against AI writing code. The productivity gains are real.

But generating code faster doesn’t automatically mean we’re engineering faster.

If our ability to produce code grows much faster than our ability to understand and maintain it, we haven’t removed the bottleneck.

We’ve just moved it.

I’m curious how other engineering teams are dealing with this. Are you seeing the same thing in your codebase?

18/08/2026

Small backend inconsistencies become big problems at scale.

Different error formats. Different naming styles. Different response structures.

Agreeing on conventions early saves a lot of unnecessary pain later.

What backend convention do you think every team should agree on?

13/08/2026

Retries are one of those things that feel like a reliability feature until you see what happens when everyone starts retrying at once.

A request fails.

You retry it.

It fails again, so you retry again.

Seems reasonable.

Now imagine thousands of clients doing the same thing at the same time while the service is already struggling.

The system is under pressure, and instead of reducing the load, you’re adding more of it.

That’s how a small failure can turn into a much bigger incident.

Retries are useful. But retries on their own don’t make a system reliable.

You need backoff so clients don’t all come knocking at once. Timeouts so requests don’t hang forever. Idempotency so repeating an operation doesn’t create unintended side effects. And limits so a failure doesn’t trigger an endless cycle of more traffic.

One thing I’ve learned about distributed systems is that recovery mechanisms can sometimes become part of the failure.

The goal isn’t just to retry when something goes wrong.

It’s to recover without making the original problem worse.

10/08/2026

Not every engineer needs to become a manager.

There’s this idea that career growth eventually means moving away from writing code, managing people, and spending less time on the technical side of things.

I’ve never really agreed with that.

Management is a career path. It’s not the final destination for everyone.

Some of the best engineers I know have spent years getting better at the technical work without ever wanting to manage a team. They chose to go deeper instead of wider.

And there’s a lot of growth in that.

Taking on harder technical problems. Understanding systems at a deeper level. Making better trade-offs. Learning how to work through ambiguity. Mentoring younger engineers. Becoming the person people call when a problem is messy and nobody knows where to start.

You don’t have to stop building things for your career to be moving forward.

Sometimes growth looks like a bigger team and more responsibility.

Sometimes it looks like becoming ridiculously good at your craft.

Both are valid.

A bigger title isn’t the only proof that you’re progressing.

Sometimes, getting really good at the thing you genuinely enjoy doing is the growth.

07/08/2026

Some of the most valuable engineering work never appears in a demo.

Nobody applauds the person who renamed confusing variables across a service. Nobody shares screenshots of cleaner logs or better monitoring dashboards. Nobody celebrates deleting a thousand lines of code that no longer serve a purpose.

Yet those are often the changes that make the next release smoother.

Early in my career, I thought impact looked dramatic. New features. Big migrations. Fancy architecture diagrams.

Over time, my definition changed.

Impact is making life easier for the next engineer who has to understand your work.

It is leaving clear documentation instead of assumptions.

It is choosing readable code over clever code.

It is adding meaningful error messages because you know someone will eventually wake up at 2 AM trying to understand what went wrong.

Engineering is cumulative.

Every thoughtful decision makes the system slightly easier to maintain. Every shortcut without context quietly increases the cost of future work.

The engineers I admire most aren’t just good builders.

They’re good caretakers.

They leave systems, codebases, and teams healthier than they found them.

That’s a contribution that compounds long after the feature ships.

What’s one small engineering habit you’ve adopted that has saved you or your team time later on?

04/08/2026

I’ve learned that distributed systems have a way of keeping you humble. They remind you that just because you didn’t get the outcome you expected doesn’t mean nothing happened.

Sometimes the operation succeeded and the response was lost. Sometimes it failed halfway through. Sometimes it’s still running while you’re already trying to recover from it.

The challenge isn’t always fixing the issue.

The challenge is understanding the system well enough to know where the truth actually lives.

That’s why good engineering isn’t just about writing reliable code. It’s about building systems that make failures observable, predictable, and easier to reason about when things inevitably go wrong.

The more I work on distributed systems, the more I realize that certainty is a luxury.

The best engineers aren’t the ones who never face uncertainty. They’re the ones who know how to navigate it.

03/08/2026

One of the most underrated career skills has nothing to do with your technical ability.

It’s being easy to work with.

I’ve met incredibly talented people who could solve difficult problems in minutes, but working with them felt exhausting. Every discussion became an argument. Every code review felt personal. Every collaboration required unnecessary effort.

I’ve also worked with engineers who were just as capable, but made everyone around them better. They listened before responding. They gave constructive feedback. They communicated clearly. They were the kind of people you wanted on every project.

Over time, I realized something.

Technical skills might get you hired, but how you work with people often determines how far you go.

Software is built by teams, not individuals. The best ideas usually come from conversations, healthy disagreements, and people who know how to collaborate without making everything a battle.

Being reliable, respectful, and easy to work with doesn’t make you less ambitious.

It makes people trust you with bigger responsibilities.

And trust is one of the few career advantages that compounds over time.

30/07/2026

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned in software engineering is that building more doesn’t always create more value.

Early in my career, I thought every feature request deserved a feature. If users asked for it, we built it. If an idea sounded interesting, we added it to the roadmap.

Over time, I realized that every feature comes with a cost.

It has to be designed, built, tested, monitored, documented, and maintained. It introduces new edge cases, more complexity, and another piece of the system that someone will eventually have to understand and support.

That’s why product thinking is so important.

Sometimes the best decision isn’t adding another feature. It’s simplifying the experience, removing unnecessary complexity, or deciding that a problem doesn’t need a technical solution at all.

I’ve come to appreciate that saying “no” isn’t about rejecting ideas. It’s about protecting focus.

The products we admire aren’t successful because they have the most features. They’re successful because they solve the right problems without overwhelming the people using them.

As engineers, it’s easy to measure progress by how much we’ve built.

But some of the most valuable work happens when we choose not to build something.

That’s a product decision. And it’s a skill worth developing.

28/07/2026

One of the biggest outages this month wasn’t caused by hackers or failing hardware.

It was caused by time.

A defect in the time synchronization systems used by one of Australia’s largest telecom providers disrupted mobile calls, data services, and even parts of the regional rail network.

What caught my attention wasn’t just the outage. It was what it revealed. The most dangerous parts of a system are often the ones nobody talks about.

Every engineering team has them. The service that’s always been available. The dependency that’s never failed. The piece of infrastructure everyone assumes will keep working.

Until it doesn’t.

One lesson I’ve learned is that reliability isn’t built by trusting your dependencies. It’s built by understanding them. A useful exercise for any team is to identify the few services your system quietly depends on and ask one simple question:

What happens if this fails today?

If the answer is everything, you’ve just found your next engineering priority. The biggest outages rarely begin where everyone is looking. They usually start with the assumptions nobody thought to challenge.

What’s one dependency in your system that has always worked but probably hasn’t been properly tested in a while?

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