Modern Engineering · For senior engineers, architects and tech leads

Keep your engineering skills relevant as AI changes the industry around you.

Coding agents made writing code cheap. What keeps you valuable now is everything around it: context, architecture, quality, production feedback and the economics behind your decisions. Modern Engineering is where you build those skills from real work, with ready-to-use engineering kits, field notes from a live software company and peers going through the same change.

or $249/year · cancel anytime · 4 spots left at this price

Why now

Code got cheaper. The rest of the system now decides how fast you deliver.

Coding agents made implementation faster. That does not automatically make teams deliver more: when one part of a system speeds up, the other constraints show. Requirements, reliable context, architecture, integration boundaries, review, test infrastructure, production feedback and organizational dependencies start to dominate delivery time.

Some of the skills that defined strong engineering a few years ago are no longer enough on their own. Most of them still matter. What changes is how you use them and what you combine them with. These are the capabilities the community focuses on:

Reliable context

Make domain rules, decisions and architecture boundaries available to people and agents without flooding either with irrelevant detail.

Architecture and design

Structure software and teams so that rapid change stays controlled, reviewable and economically sustainable.

Execution and quality

Use agentic workflows, automation, tests, guardrails and review to deliver faster without giving up engineering responsibility.

Production feedback

Investigate issues with traceable evidence, operate secure tooling, and feed what you learn back into the next piece of work.

Team capability and economics

Find organizational bottlenecks, track system health and unit economics, and link technology choices to business value.

Practical judgment

Know when a new technique solves a real problem, when its trade-offs rule it out, and when the claims behind it are not yet demonstrated.

Who it's for

For people who already build and lead real systems

Experienced software engineers who want to redesign how they work, rather than only learning another coding tool.

Software architects who need to reason about context, boundaries, reliability and change in AI-assisted delivery.

Tech leads and engineering managers responsible for team throughput, operating models, standards and quality.

Engineering leaders and CTOs connecting engineering capability to economic outcomes, organizational design and technology risk.

What it is
  • Hands-on material rooted in production engineering
  • A continuous learning channel about modern engineering
  • Resources you can inspect, adapt and reuse
  • Candid field notes, including failures and open trade-offs
  • Engineering and business thinking together
What it is not
  • A generic "AI tips and prompts" community
  • A one-off course with a fixed syllabus
  • A bundle of inspirational essays with nothing to use
  • A polished, success-only startup story
  • Tied to one language, IDE or model
Already in the library

Resources you can use from day one

Each resource comes with its problem, prerequisites, workflow, deliverables and known limitations stated up front. These are already in the shared Resources space, and new ones are added regularly.

Cover of the Production Investigation Kit guide: evidence-first investigations with Claude CodeGuide page "The security model", showing four layers: identity and Azure RBAC, database permissions and views, agent tool permissions, and a guard hook
v1.1ZIP · 37-page illustrated guide

Production Investigation Kit

Evidence-first production investigations with Claude Code, on top of scoped, least-privilege Azure access. The security design is part of the resource: an investigator-only identity, restricted SQL views, auditing and separation of duties, with agent-side guardrails layered on top.

What's in it
  • Investigator sub-agent plus skills for the investigation procedure, SQL queries and KQL / Log Analytics queries
  • Azure identity, group and role setup, investigation views and read-only database access
  • Auditing, and a separation between investigator access and audit-log access
  • A guard hook that blocks write operations, Azure changes and account switching
  • PowerShell and Bash setup scripts, prerequisite checks, guard tests and a verification checklist
  • Worked examples and an evidence-linked report structure
Production_Investigation_Kit/
├── .claude/
│   ├── agents/investigator.md
│   ├── hooks/investigation_guard.py
│   └── skills/  investigate · query-sql · query-kql
├── azure/       01-create-groups … 07-verify-access
├── GUIDES/      01_WHAT_YOU_WILL_BUILD … 06_CHECKLIST
├── tools/       check_prereqs · scan_for_identifiers · test_guard
└── Production_Investigation_Kit_Guide.pdf

Assumes Claude Code, Azure App Service, Azure SQL and Application Insights / Log Analytics. It documents an opinionated, working setup: adapt it, test it in a sandbox first, and never run it directly against production.

“I especially like that it goes beyond the concepts and covers the actual implementation, from setting up least-privilege access and auditing to integrating Claude Code and adapting the workflow to a real system. This kind of practical, security-conscious approach to AI-assisted engineering is exactly what I'd like to learn more about.”

Amirhosein, .NET Developer
Cover of the Context Layer documentation starter kit guideGuide page "Repository structure", showing the AGENTS.md, docs, skills, validator and CI layout
v1.0ZIP · 10-page implementation guide

Context Layer Documentation Starter Kit

A structured way to make project knowledge discoverable for coding agents, instead of a flat document dump. Documents own the facts, skills own the procedures, and changes to domain and architecture decisions stay subject to human confirmation.

What's in it
  • Repository-level AGENTS.md and a documentation index with system overview, architecture, domain, features and engineering sections
  • Metadata and lifecycle statuses: draft, current, needs-review, deprecated
  • Three skills: Discover Context, Assemble Context and Maintain Documentation
  • A dependency-free Python documentation validator and a sample GitHub Actions workflow
  • Guides for adopting it in an existing repository, plus a worked feature example

Provider-agnostic in its model, with integration guidance for several coding-agent setups.

Guide page "The nine report sections", from executive summary to trend versus the previous review
v1.1ZIP · 7-page guide

Technology Health & Unit Economics Review Toolkit

A repeatable periodic review that looks at system health and economic sustainability together: cost to run, unit economics, scalability, delivery performance, reliability, security posture and technical risk, with a trend against the previous review.

What's in it
  • A blank workbook and a privacy-screened Atherio example workbook (June to August 2026)
  • A standard-library Python generator that turns a workbook into an HTML report
  • Optional comparison against the previous period by matched metric keys
  • A metric schema and a guide to reading metrics responsibly
Technology_Health_Unit_Economics_Review_Toolkit/
├── example-atherio/  Atherio_Public_Example.xlsx · _Report.html
├── generator/        generate_report.py · metric_schema.json
├── guide/            Technology_Health_Review_Guide.pdf
└── templates/        Technology_Health_Blank.xlsx · Blank_Report_Preview.html

Not connected to billing or telemetry providers: the accuracy of a review depends on the evidence you enter.

Cover of the ebook API Versioning for The Real World by Dan Patrascu
EbookFull book · examples in .NET

API Versioning for The Real World

API versioning treated as a producer and consumer compatibility problem, starting from a real production incident. When and why to version, the trade-offs between URL, query-parameter and header versioning, and how to implement it in ASP.NET.

What's in it
  • Why and when consumers force a new version
  • URL, query-parameter and header / media-type versioning compared
  • ASP.NET implementation with the Asp.Versioning libraries
  • Deprecation and communication: changelogs, consumer notice and support timelines

Code samples target .NET 8 and version 8.1.0 of the versioning libraries; check current package versions before reusing them.

All of this is included in one membership, along with every resource added after you join.

Join for $29/month
Inside a real software company

Field notes from building Atherio, as it happens

Atherio is the company I co-founded and run as CTO, and it works as a live engineering laboratory for this community. You follow real decisions as they are made: architecture trade-offs, AI-assisted workflows, integrations and infrastructure, operational constraints, prioritization, team structure, and the mistakes that change what we do next.

I keep three things apart: what is proven in Atherio's specific environment, what generalizes to other teams, and what is still an experiment. I don't present Atherio as a blueprint to copy.

Topic space

AI-Assisted Engineering

Agent workflows and integrations, context architecture, skills, controlled implementation, security and verification, team practices and realistic productivity measurement.

Topic space

Software Architecture

Pragmatic design, API contracts and versioning, module boundaries, documentation, architectural constraints, reliability, scaling and change management.

Topic space

Running Atherio

Real decisions and trade-offs in a young software company: architecture, people, operating economics, delivery, leadership and lessons learned.

Plus Resources for every download, Discussion for longer threads, and Chat for quicker exchanges.

Membership

What you get as a member

Practical Engineering Resources

Templates, workbooks, guides, scripts, skills and setups you can download and adapt.

Modern Engineering Practices

How engineering work is changing, from context and planning to quality and production feedback.

Software Architecture Insights

Design decisions, boundaries and trade-offs, explained with the reasoning behind them.

Behind the Scenes at Atherio

Decisions and experiments from a live software company, while they happen.

New Resources Every Week

A regular flow of new practical material, with roughly one resource a week as the target.

A Community of Practitioners

Questions and discussion with people working through the same problems.

How it works

  1. 01

    Join

    Pick monthly or yearly at the Circle checkout.

  2. 02

    Get oriented

    You land in the Welcome space, with everything you need to find your way around.

  3. 03

    Use the resources

    Download what fits your current work from the shared Resources space.

  4. 04

    Follow and discuss

    Read the field notes as they are published and join the discussion.

Dan Patrascu-Baba speaking on stage at DevTalks
Who runs it

Hi, I'm Dan Patrascu-Baba

I'm the co-founder and CTO of Atherio and the creator of Cycle-Driven Engineering. I have spent 15+ years in software architecture and engineering leadership, and delivered 200+ talks and workshops.

Almost 20,000 people follow my writing on LinkedIn. The community is where I share the full material behind those posts: the setups, templates and decisions.

  • 15+years in architecture and leadership
  • 200+talks and workshops
  • ~20kLinkedIn followers

Free reading on the same topics: how to stay relevant as a software engineer in the age of AI, the Context Layer, how I know my system is healthy, and everything else on the blog.

“I especially like that it goes beyond the concepts and covers the actual implementation, from setting up least-privilege access and auditing to integrating Claude Code and adapting the workflow to a real system. This kind of practical, security-conscious approach to AI-assisted engineering is exactly what I'd like to learn more about.”

Amirhosein, .NET Developer
Pricing

One membership, everything included

All spaces, the full resource library and every resource added later. No tiers.

Most flexible
Monthly
$29/ month

Billed monthly. Cancel anytime from your account.

Join monthly
Yearly
$249/ year

About $20.75 a month, $99 less than paying monthly for a year.

Join yearly

4 spots left at this price. The price goes up by $2/month and $20/year for every 10 new members. You keep the price you joined at for as long as you stay subscribed.

Prices in USD. You choose monthly or yearly at the Circle checkout. Cancel anytime from your account; access continues until the end of the period you paid for.

Common questions

Before you join

Who is Modern Engineering for?

Experienced software engineers, software architects, tech leads, engineering managers and CTOs who want to keep their skills relevant as software engineering changes. It assumes you already build or lead the building of real systems.

Is this an AI community?

AI-assisted development is one of the main topics, but the community covers how engineering as a whole is changing: architecture, engineering workflows, quality, operations, team practices and the realities of running a software business.

Do I need to use .NET, Azure or a specific coding agent?

No. The community is not tied to a language, IDE or model. Some resources are stack-specific and say so up front: the Production Investigation Kit assumes Azure and Claude Code, and the API versioning book uses .NET examples. The Context Layer starter kit is provider-agnostic.

What do I get access to when I join?

Everything. One membership covers all spaces and the full resource library, with no tiers and no extra paywalls inside the community.

How often is new material added?

The working target is roughly one new resource a week, alongside ongoing field notes. Quality comes first: a resource is published when it is complete enough to use, with its scope, requirements and limitations stated.

Will the price go up?

Yes. The price increases by $2 a month and $20 a year for every 10 new members. Your price stays the same for as long as you remain subscribed.

Can I cancel?

Yes, at any time, from the billing page in your Circle account. Your access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Do you offer refunds or a free trial?

No. There is no free trial and payments are not refunded. If you want to try it first, choose the monthly plan and cancel if it is not for you. Cancelling a yearly plan stops the renewal but does not refund the rest of the year.

Start with what's already there.

Join, download the resources that fit your current work, and follow along as new material arrives.

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