Scott Mallinson
The shape of shared libraries
A shared library is defined by the shape it presents to its dependents. Two cases make that concrete: an icon component used through an undeclared path, and a one-line logging change that quietly broke a numeric assumption.
Three quiet bugs hiding in a cross-service feature
Shipping a feature across four services meant coordinating an AI backend, a fare search service, and two frontend components. Along the way: a silent configuration bug, a duplicate event contract, and an HTML injection path.
The scaffolding tax: getting a new service properly bootstrapped
Bootstrapping a new service from a template isn't just renaming things — it's wiring it into the deployment pipeline, getting dependency management right, and building the scaffolding that makes all future work faster.
Shipping a conversational search flow across services
Cross-service work: shipping an end-to-end conversational flight search flow, instrumenting an MCP server with privacy-aware observability, improving AI coding assistant context injection, and cleaning up inconsistent naming across the codebase.
Release pipelines should be boring
Time spent fixing a flaky release pipeline sounds like a lot of infrastructure work. Here's why its effects on a team are easy to undercount.
Granular Dependabot groups and getting error attribution right
Repos got granular Dependabot grouping and a shared error library got a missing origin type. Neither is glamorous — both are the kind of thing that keeps a platform manageable.
The notification that wouldn't leave
A booking interface was showing a queue warning banner after it should have disappeared. The fix was small; the pattern it points to is worth thinking about.