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.
11 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.
25 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 9-chapter series taking you from zero Docker knowledge through containers, images, networking, volumes, Compose, security, CI/CD, and orchestration — everything you need to run Docker confidently in production.
9 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
Observability in Depth: Metrics, Logs, and Traces from First Principles
A 7-chapter series building production-grade observability by hand in Go — Prometheus metrics, alerting, structured logs, distributed tracing, and the correlation that ties all three into one incident workflow.
7 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
Kafka vs RabbitMQ: Two Models That Are Converging
Kafka is a log and RabbitMQ is a queue, until Kafka Share Groups and RabbitMQ Streams started borrowing each other's model. Choose by consumption model, not by product name.
Makefile: Turn Long Commands Into Short Ones
Makefile lets you turn long commands (docker, curl, k6...) into short, memorable, repeatable ones — no C compiler knowledge required.
The Thundering Herd Problem: A Practical Playbook
Every thundering herd is a synchronization bug. Here's how to spot the four common triggers and match each one to the right fix.
PostHog's Architecture: What Kafka, ClickHouse, and Feature Flags Teach You
Skip the product pitch. PostHog is worth studying for its ingestion pipeline and its feature-flag latency fix — two patterns worth stealing whether or not you ever touch the product.
The OWASP Top 10:2025 Update: What Changed and Why It Matters
OWASP quietly replaced the 2021 Top 10 in November 2025. SSRF disappeared, misconfiguration jumped to #2, and supply chain got its own top-3 slot — here's the diff.
The Outbox Pattern: Solving the Dual-Write Problem
Every microservice eventually hits the dual-write trap. The outbox pattern is the right fix — but it moves complexity from your application code into your infrastructure.