AI can write code faster than you. But can it engineer software?

In his viral article "How AI Changed the Way I Engineer Software", Dean made the case that AI turns a solo developer into a team — but only if you bring the engineering judgment that no model can replicate. This book is where that judgment comes from.

Modern Software Engineering (Vol. 1) distills 20 years of hands-on experience — from debugging production outages to leading large-scale system redesigns — into five foundational disciplines every modern engineer needs to master:

1. System Design — Microservices, serverless, event-driven architectures, and the principles (scalability, reliability, security) that make them work in the real world.

2. Testing — From TDD to modern automated techniques, learned the hard way through war stories you'll recognize.

3. Documentation — Why it matters, what "effective" actually looks like, and how to keep it alive as your codebase evolves.

4. Deployment — Blue-green, canary, rolling updates, containerisation — the strategies that let you ship with confidence.

5. Continuous Evolution — CI/CD, observability, and the practices that keep your systems (and your team) improving over time.

This isn't a textbook. Each chapter opens with a real story, delivers practical principles, and closes with reflection questions you can use alone, with your team, or across your organisation.

Whether you're a senior engineer sharpening your craft, a tech lead mentoring your team, or a developer learning to work alongside AI — this book gives you the foundation that makes everything else work.

Your purchase includes a free personal coaching session plus an A$40 coupon toward any coaching subscription or group mentoring.