Most hard problems don't need a bigger team.

Walk into most engineering orgs with a genuinely hard problem and watch what happens: the headcount goes up, the architecture diagram sprouts another dozen boxes, the cloud bill quietly doubles, and a year later nobody can fully explain how any of it works. That's the default. FarseerTech is the bet against it.

FarseerTech is an engineering practice with one obsession: solving complicated problems frugally. The simplest system that actually works. The fewest moving parts someone has to own. The smallest bill at the end of the quarter — in compute, in COGS, and in the number of engineers it takes to keep the lights on.

Complexity and headcount feel like progress. Usually they're just deferred liability with a nicer name — there's a whole field note about that. The frugal solution is harder to find; it takes more judgment, not less. But it's the one you can still run, still afford, and still reason about when it matters most.

In practice that looks like:

• Fewer services — systems a handful of people can hold in their heads.
• Lower COGS — every box on the diagram has to earn its bill.
• Leaner teams — the goal is more leverage per engineer, not more engineers.

Behind it is Yusuf Tinwala — founder, and (only half-joking) Chief Frugal Officer. The writing here is the practice out loud: field notes on the messy, expensive, eventually-obvious parts of building software at scale.

New notes land here as they're written. If that's your kind of engineering, follow along via RSS.