The Principal Craft
Tuan Hiep TRAN
I write about principal-level engineering: architecture judgment, operating models, failure-aware design, and the craft of moving complex systems without losing their invariants.
Architecture Strategy
How to shape systems through constraints, boundaries, ownership, and long-lived decisions.
Engineering Judgment
Decision frameworks for ambiguous trade-offs where correctness, velocity, and operability collide.
Production Reflection
Notes on failure modes, rollback paths, governance, observability, and the cost of hidden coupling.
What This Blog Is
This is a field notebook on the Principal craft: not just how systems are built, but how architectural choices age, fracture, scale, and shape engineering organizations.
The main themes are enterprise complexity, distributed ordering, resilient pipelines, PostgreSQL at scale, reactive systems, production engineering, and architecture as a discipline of judgment.
Reading map: for broader system-design patterns and reusable architecture bricks, start with System Design & AI Infra.