Soren Learning
A personal collection of technical notes, product thinking, design principles, and growth frameworks.
Categories
Design & UX
Visual design principles, interaction patterns, research habits, and user experience frameworks for building clear, usable products.
2 itemsGrowth & Soft Skills
Learning techniques, communication skills, mental models, and personal development practices for long-term professional growth.
10 itemsProduct Mindset
How to think like a product person through strategy, prioritization, user understanding, and outcome-oriented decision making.
11 itemsTechnical
Engineering knowledge across system design, programming, infrastructure, software architecture, and delivery practices.
14 itemsSeries
Design Systems from a Code Perspective
A 7-chapter, engineering-first guide to building, shipping, and migrating to a design system — tokens, component APIs, Storybook, versioning, dark mode, and the migration playbook — using React + Tailwind + shadcn/ui.
7 chapters
UX Fundamentals for Developers
An 8-chapter, opinionated guide to the parts of UX a developer can actually control — heuristics, information architecture, typography, color, forms, and the states everyone forgets — with real code in React + Tailwind.
8 chapters
Career Growth in Tech
The practical guide to managing your career in tech — from acing performance reviews and negotiating offers, to building a personal brand, networking as an introvert, and knowing when to stay or leave.
6 chapters
Communication for Engineers
A practical series on the communication skills that determine how much of your technical work actually lands. Seven chapters on async updates, presentations, remote etiquette, meetings, documentation, conflict, and cross-cultural collaboration.
7 chapters
Deep Work & Productivity for Engineers
How to do your best technical work consistently — protecting focus, building knowledge systems, managing the hidden costs of interruption, and recovering when you push too hard for too long.
5 chapters
The Senior Engineer Playbook
The practical guide to operating at senior level — from the mindset shift that separates senior from mid-level, to the specific skills that get engineers to Staff and beyond. Six chapters on leadership, communication, scope, influence, and feedback.
6 chapters
Business Acumen for Senior Engineers
A working engineer's guide to operating literacy — reading a P&L, understanding unit economics, mapping business models to architecture, cost-aware engineering, stakeholder mapping, and presenting technical work to non-technical audiences.
6 chapters
From Engineer to Product Thinker
The mindset shift from executing specs to shaping them. Eight chapters on the day-to-day craft of thinking like a product person while staying an engineer — from JTBD and PRD reading to graceful pushback and outcome-driven work.
8 chapters
The Pragmatic Guide to Scrum: Foundations of Agile Delivery
An overview of Agile principles and the Scrum framework, focusing on the roles and values that drive successful product development.
5 chapters
Product Discovery for Engineers
A working engineer's guide to product discovery — user interviews, data-informed decisions, A/B testing, feature flags, shadow and canary launches, and kill criteria. The practices that turn engineers into builders of the right thing.
6 chapters
Anthropic
Deep dives into Anthropic's tools, models, and workflows for building AI-powered products.
2 chapters
Auth in Depth: From Passwords to Zero Trust
A complete 16-chapter journey from authentication fundamentals to zero trust architecture — covering JWT, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, RBAC, ABAC, MFA, and real-world security patterns.
16 chapters
Design Patterns in Kotlin: A Practical Guide
A complete 5-chapter series covering all 23 Gang of Four design patterns through a practical Kotlin lens — with real-world examples from Spring, OkHttp, Android, and Jetpack Compose.
5 chapters
Docker in Depth: From Basics to Orchestration
A 6-chapter series taking you from Docker fundamentals through networking, Compose, security, CI/CD pipelines, and container orchestration — everything you need to run Docker confidently in production.
6 chapters
Domain-Driven Design: Building Software That Speaks Business
A 6-chapter journey from DDD philosophy through strategic design, tactical building blocks, and real-world architecture — the definitive guide to modeling complex domains.
6 chapters
Software Testing: From Fundamentals to Modern Practice
A practical, engineer-focused guide to software testing — the testing pyramid, TDD/BDD, automation strategy, CI/CD integration, security testing, and modern AI-assisted practices.
7 chapters
Terraform on AWS: From Zero to Production
A 6-chapter, AWS-first path from your first terraform apply to running Terraform safely in production — with state management, modules, CI/CD, and policy-as-code as a single connected story.
6 chapters
Recent Posts
RESP: The Wire Protocol Behind Every Redis Command
A byte-level walkthrough of the Redis Serialization Protocol — how commands travel over the wire, why pipelining works, and what RESP3 changes for client-side caching.
Martin Fowler on LLMs: Six Things Worth Taking Seriously
A synthesis of Martin Fowler's August 2025 essay on LLMs and software development — covering workflow gaps, hallucinations as a feature, the Lethal Trifecta security risk, and why non-determinism changes everything.
Theory of Constraints in Software Development
Your team is always busy but never fast. Theory of Constraints explains why — and gives you a five-step diagnostic that underlies Kanban, DevOps, and The Phoenix Project.
60 Linux Commands You Need to Know
A comprehensive reference guide to 60 essential Linux commands — from file navigation and user management to networking, processes, and system monitoring. Covers syntax, practical examples, and real-world usage patterns.
Optimistic vs Pessimistic Locking: Choosing the Right Concurrency Strategy
Two ways to handle concurrent writes — lock first and ask questions later, or assume conflicts are rare and detect them at commit. When to use which, with concrete SQL and code.
Every Networking Concept Explained: From a Single Server to Kubernetes
A condensed walkthrough of networking — IP, DNS, ports, subnets, NAT, VPC, Docker, and Kubernetes — by following how a real application grows.