Panayiotis Kritiotis

Staying Technical as an Engineering Manager

Fri, 15 May 2026 08:12:29 +0300

It’s Friday afternoon and you’re coming out of a week where the important work was mostly conversations. You look at the backlog and it hits you again: “I’m not doing enough technical work. I’m losing my edge. My identity. Damn.”

Redesigning my Website with an AI Partner: What a Joy

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:25:00 +0300

It’s been a long time since I wanted to redesign my website. I wanted it to feel like mine, but I kept postponing it.

The problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was a mix of time, priorities, and to be honest, motivation. I’ve never been comfortable with the plumbing of CSS and JavaScript, and I didn’t want to spend my limited time mastering frontend development just to tweak a personal blog.

Domain-Driven Design in Go: Designing Entities - What Works, What Breaks, and What’s Overkill

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:00:00 +0300

At first glance, defining an entity in Go seems simple—just a struct, right? Well, not quite.

Introduction

I’ve been fascinated with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) for a while now. I’ve been using bits and pieces of DDD for several years, but in the last couple of years, I’ve spent considerable time deep-diving into its details—refining my understanding and exploring how to apply it effectively in real-world projects.

Agile: Embrace the Philosophy, Not Rigid Framework Rules

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 15:25:00 +0300

Staying strictly fixated on any Agile framework and enforcing written-in-stone rules by the book is inefficient.

“Pure Scrum/XP/Kanban is the way”

Well, not necessarily. While all these are valid methodologies, they are not the only way.

3 Major Fallacies Engineers Make in Architecture Decisions

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 23:00:00 +0300

Over the past 10 years, I’ve led and participated in numerous architecture designs, learning a lot from my mistakes and observations.

Architecture design is the foundation of successful software. It enables business strategy and vision, and it’s crucial for evolving a system without incurring huge costs as requirements change.

5 Essential Prioritization Frameworks for Engineering Managers

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:30:00 +0300

Your time is finite, and your team’s backlog feels endless — welcome to life as an Engineering Manager.

As we highlighted in the previous post on the Engineering Manager’s ultimate goal, the most important part of your role is execution — you need to deliver results. To do this as efficiently and effectively as possible, you need to identify the highest-leverage activities that will give you the best value at a specific time. This principle applies not only to your own task list but also to your team’s backlog.

Understanding and Achieving Your Goal as an Engineering Manager: 3 Fundamental Principles

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:02:00 +0300

As an Engineering Manager, you have a lot on your plate and need a wide range of skills to be successful. From technical expertise, to execution know-how and people management, mastering all these skills takes a lifetime, no doubt about it.

Refreshing My Writing Journey

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 13:49:00 +0300

In August 2021, I published my first “Hello World” blog post. My goal was to share the valuable lessons I’ve learned and experienced with the community, while also documenting my journey and deepening my understanding of the topics I write about.

5 Lessons That Transformed How I Approach Execution as an Engineering Manager

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0300

In this blog post, I’m diving into execution; arguably the most crucial skill in engineering management because it’s all about delivering the results that drive your company forward.

Throughout my career as an engineering manager, I’ve stumbled upon some game-changing ‘Aha Moments’ that totally shifted how I think about getting things done. These insights have not only simplified my approach to executing tasks and managing projects but have also made them more straightforward and effective.

8 Tips for Pragmatic Technical Decision-Making in Fast-Paced Environments

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 16:36:00 +0300

This blog post explores the engineering decision-making challenges in fast-paced development environments, the importance of maintaining technical agility, and presents a framework to make balanced technical decisions that enable consistent velocity and quality.

Feedback loops in software engineering

Sat, 20 May 2023 12:20:00 +0300

In this blog post, I write about the power of feedback loops and the essential characteristics of the ideal feedback loop.

Introduction

Our goal, as software engineers, is to deliver software projects. Personal projects, work projects, and projects of any type, size, and industry.

Implementing a simple, generic mediator pattern in go

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 23:50:00 +0300

This article presents a simple implementation of a generic mediator in Go.

Introduction

As software systems become larger and more complex, managing the interaction dependencies between different components can become complicated. Refactoring and introducing changes can also become particularly challenging and error-prone when the interaction semantics change.

Software Documentation - Value, Misconceptions, Common Pitfalls, and Essentials

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 19:00:00 +0300

This article explores the value of software documentation, a few misconceptions about the need for documentation, and some common pitfalls we fall into when we document software.

Finally, it provides an overview of the essential documentation for software engineering teams and some guidelines for organizing documentation.

Implementing the Outbox pattern in go

Sun, 29 May 2022 16:00:00 +0300

This article presents the design and implementation of the outbox pattern in go.

Introduction

Last November, I wrote an article on what the outbox pattern is and its implementation challenges. If you are unfamiliar with the outbox pattern, I suggest reading this post first.

Software Engineering Philosophy: Tradeoffs and Quality

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 22:15:52 +0300

This post talks about software engineering philosophy; the list and priorities of the fundamental values we, software engineers, use to decide how to approach tradeoffs in software engineering problems.

Introduction

The nature of software engineering involves a continuous need for decision-making. Decision-making is needed for the design, development, and delivery of software. And can be even expanded to processes, workflows, and even organization-related challenges.

A systematic approach to Technical Requirement Analysis

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 20:30:00 +0300

This article describes a methodical way of approaching Technical Requirement Analysis that includes a list of steps that help in clarifying ambiguity and preventing unexpected issues before an engineering team jumps into the design phase.

Outbox pattern - Why, How and Implementation Challenges

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:00:00 +0300

This article presents the outbox pattern, a communication/messaging pattern used in event-driven distributed systems that allows executing database operations and reliably publishing messages.

We will examine why we need the outbox pattern, how it works, and its implementation challenges.

Designing functions that return potentially absent values in Go

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 18:00:00 +0300

This article presents a micro-level design pattern to indicate the absence of function return values idiomatically in Go.

Introduction

Code readability is one of the most critical properties of maintainable software and a significant factor in reducing cost in software development¹. It allows developers to correctly understand how software behaves with less effort while also preventing errors by eliminating wrong assumptions.

Clean Architecture in Go [2024 Updated]

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 21:30:00 +0300

❇️ This post and the respective repository was updated in August 2024 to reflect a simplified infra layering approach and more accurate terminology

This article covers the fundamentals of the Clean Architecture design concept and demonstrates how to apply its principles in Go through a simple web app implementation.

My Hello World

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 14:15:52 +0300

I have been thinking about starting a blog for a few years, and I feel this is now the right time.

Why this blog?

There are multiple reasons for starting this blog.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Panayiotis Kritiotis.

I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at efood, and I write about the parts of software engineering that sit between code, people, and judgment.

Throughout my career I’ve always been deep in the technical craft: building systems, thinking about architecture, messing with Go, and caring a bit obsessively about clean boundaries and good design. Over time, my work expanded into engineering leadership, but the technical side never stopped being central to how I work and think.