Welcome

From concept to mid-development, I’d love to team up with you and ship your digital product — zero-defect, a pleasure to use, build and maintain, welcoming change, a team’s pride and long-term business asset — not just ideals, but actual outcomes I consistently deliver through dozens of engineering practices.

I bring reliable, transparent collaboration and true ownership, balancing practicality with quality.

I specialize in B2* domains — retail, finance, legal, B2C, B2B, B2G, and more. I quickly grasp the essence of your domain and ensure the most valuable features are delivered at their best, fully business-justified.

You're warmly welcome on my website.

Feel free to drop me a line or two if you’d like to chat.

Yours,
Valentine Shi

What You'll Find Here

My reviews of the great books on software engineering, project deliverables, insights, and writings—all crafted to inform, inspire, and spark meaningful conversations in software engineering and business.

For Business Leaders & Product Teams

  • Actionable engineering insights framed through a business lens (tagged Business).
  • Topics like technical debt, requirements quality, and domain-driven design—translated into ROI, risk mitigation, and long-term value.
  • Humor and analogies (e.g., Software Product is an Omelette) to demystify complex ideas.

For Engineers & Developers

  • Deep dives into architecture, TDD, tooling, and patterns (tagged Engineering).
  • Practical guides and thought-provoking essays.
  • Humor tag for levity—because even serious work benefits from a laugh.

Why It Matters

  • Clarity over jargon: Whether you’re a CEO or a coder, my content bridges gaps without oversimplifying.
  • Proven outcomes: Every piece ties back to real-world shipping—zero-defect products, maintainable code, and teams that thrive.
  • Your time respected: Everything here reflects my hands-on experience—no AI-generated fluff or recycled ideas.

Engineering Context

Consider the content of my website in the following main context: moderate (and above) complexity business (B2*) applications 1. For example, serious MVPs that deliver unique business value2 fall into this category.

The applications involving 5+ actors (of sky level use case 3), 10-20+ internal and external subsystems, 50+ application and domain classes 4, some 50+ dependencies packages 5.

The applications containing front-ends and backends in multiple combinations.

Databases, other persistence on demand 6, eventing and queueing 7, observability tools 8, deployment 9, user behavior analytics 10.

Footnotes

  1. Not system or CLI utilities, not specific requirement software tooling , not games development; ↩

  2. We talk about applications delivering business value beyond the obvious and beyond basic read/write operations (CRUD for programmers). Nevertheless, both obvious and basic capabilities remain inherent parts of applications discussed. ↩

  3. Cockburn A., Writing Effective Use Cases (2001), p. 61, "Three Named Goal Levels", what he calls "kite" level; ↩

  4. We talk here strongly typed object-oriented software implementation; ↩

  5. Does not matter whether we talk NPM (Node), Composer (PHP), NuGet (C#/.NET). ↩

  6. Key-value stores say, Redis, S3-like object stores; ↩

  7. No megalomania here. Start right at the demand level. eventemitter3 is great event management to start. BullMQ and many the like are great when a queue is needed. Can add more if the added complexity brings value. ↩

  8. My starting point here is Pino - Promtail - Loki - Grafana for structured logging, Sentry for exceptions and debugging. The rest depends on a concrete task at hand. ↩

  9. API gateways (Traefik), containerized deployment (Docker / Compose / Swarm). ↩

  10. Amplitude, Mixpanel, others. ↩