Designing systems that last, and teams that can own them. Notes on platform architecture, engineering leadership and the trade-offs in between.https://munirhassan.com/https://munirhassan.com/2026/10/06/tech-debt-snowballs-then-it-avalanches/https://munirhassan.com/2026/10/06/tech-debt-snowballs-then-it-avalanches/Technical debt rarely fails slowly. It grows quietly for months, then one day nothing can move until it's fixed. How to spot the snowball, why you don't get to choose the avalanche day, and what a lead can do before it arrives.Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/deep-work-read-as-a-lead-engineer/https://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/deep-work-read-as-a-lead-engineer/Cal Newport's Deep Work argues that focus is getting rarer just as it becomes more valuable. Three ideas I'm taking from it, and the tension it doesn't resolve for anyone who leads a team.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/dont-build-business-logic-on-an-expiry-notification/https://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/dont-build-business-logic-on-an-expiry-notification/A background process that was going to be triggered by a cache telling us a key had expired. Why that's fragile, the queue-and-scheduler design we chose instead, and why we deliberately stopped short of a full event-driven rebuild.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/last-write-wins-and-the-customer-loses/https://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/last-write-wins-and-the-customer-loses/A multi-tab bug that looked like a one-off defect turned out to be a design assumption the product had outgrown. Why I argued for fixing the model, not just the bug, and how to raise that kind of risk.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/release-risk-usually-isnt-in-the-code/https://munirhassan.com/2026/10/03/release-risk-usually-isnt-in-the-code/Most release risk I've dealt with wasn't a software defect. It was environment differences, unclear ownership of manual steps, late changes and rollback plans nobody had tried. What I learned preparing a high-risk platform migration.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2026/09/27/being-right-is-not-the-job/https://munirhassan.com/2026/09/27/being-right-is-not-the-job/Cong Wang's essay on why he stopped arguing, a 2,500-year-old line from Lao Tzu, and what changes when you're the one who has to make technical decisions stick.Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2026/09/27/what-i-delegated-to-an-ai-agent/https://munirhassan.com/2026/09/27/what-i-delegated-to-an-ai-agent/I migrated this site from WordPress to a static site in one afternoon, working with an AI agent. The speed was impressive. The more useful lessons were about where the agent stopped and I had to decide.Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2023/07/24/sitecore-headless-listing-component-using-placeholder/https://munirhassan.com/2023/07/24/sitecore-headless-listing-component-using-placeholder/We need two JSON Rendering components: one for the list items and one for the container that holds the list. For example: MessageListItem, MessageListCard. The Next.js code for the…Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:53:00 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2023/07/24/sitecore-headless-next-js-convert-a-string-into-a-sitecore-data-type/https://munirhassan.com/2023/07/24/sitecore-headless-next-js-convert-a-string-into-a-sitecore-data-type/In Next.js, we can convert a string into a Sitecore data type. Sitecore typically stores data in fields with specific data types such as Single Line Text, Rich Text, Date, Boolean,…Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:33:37 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2023/03/28/sitecore-exm-couldnt-lock-the-item/https://munirhassan.com/2023/03/28/sitecore-exm-couldnt-lock-the-item/Recently we encountered a warning message "Couldn't lock the item LHSImage RHSCopy 2" when we changed an image in a custom email and clicked Save. We have several custom Sitecore…Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:14:14 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2023/03/28/facebook-conversion-api/https://munirhassan.com/2023/03/28/facebook-conversion-api/Introduction In January 2020, Google made clear its intention to stop supporting third party cookies in Chrome. Third party cookies have been the backbone of the display and native…Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:12:01 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/10/17/powershell-scrips-to-get-sitecore-user-information/https://munirhassan.com/2021/10/17/powershell-scrips-to-get-sitecore-user-information/Sometimes we might need to get Sitecore user information in detail. The information isn’t always in the same place, so different scripts are handy for extracting different details.…Sun, 17 Oct 2021 20:31:10 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/09/30/email-dispatch-issue-sitecore-exm/https://munirhassan.com/2021/09/30/email-dispatch-issue-sitecore-exm/Recently we faced an interesting Sitecore EXM issue. We can create an email with a name up to 100 characters long. The default maxLength is 100 . Once we create the email, we can…Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:20:31 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/08/15/dialogflow-custom-payload-for-facebook-messenger/https://munirhassan.com/2021/08/15/dialogflow-custom-payload-for-facebook-messenger/We are developing a chatbot for one of our clients. The chatbot is for Facebook Messenger, and in the back end we are using Google Cloud Dialogflow. Dialogflow is a natural…Sun, 15 Aug 2021 12:40:01 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/08/14/on-sitecore-publish-update-a-single-record-in-the-index/https://munirhassan.com/2021/08/14/on-sitecore-publish-update-a-single-record-in-the-index/Recently we faced an interesting problem. We were updating a Sitecore item field, but after publishing, the change was not reflected in the search results, which come from the…Sat, 14 Aug 2021 11:50:29 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/05/11/send-alert-when-sitecore-running-jobs-get-stuck/https://munirhassan.com/2021/05/11/send-alert-when-sitecore-running-jobs-get-stuck/Recently we faced an issue in production where a Sitecore job hung. It blocked other jobs, and all our search index rebuild jobs were stuck in the queue. End users were not getting…Tue, 11 May 2021 22:20:53 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/04/28/programatically-resume-paused-email-sitecore-exm/https://munirhassan.com/2021/04/28/programatically-resume-paused-email-sitecore-exm/When an email campaign is dispatched, it moves through a number of states (Draft, Queuing, Sending, and Sent). If an error occurs during dispatch and the IIS server is interrupted,…Wed, 28 Apr 2021 21:35:44 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/03/30/sitecore-9-experience-profile-error/https://munirhassan.com/2021/03/30/sitecore-9-experience-profile-error/Recently I set up Sitecore 9.1 (scaled) for our UAT environment. When I opened the Experience Profile from the Launchpad, I got an error and no data was displayed in the dashboard.…Tue, 30 Mar 2021 13:01:07 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/03/29/remove-sitecore-users-from-the-core-database/https://munirhassan.com/2021/03/29/remove-sitecore-users-from-the-core-database/Sometimes we need to clear out old users, or all users in a specific domain. We can do this from the Sitecore User Manager by removing them one by one, but with a large number of…Mon, 29 Mar 2021 14:47:56 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/03/28/filter-user-by-domain-in-sitecore-user-manager/https://munirhassan.com/2021/03/28/filter-user-by-domain-in-sitecore-user-manager/Recently we ran into an issue with the Sitecore User Manager. We have more than 500k users, so finding a specific user was troublesome. We thought that if we could filter users by…Sun, 28 Mar 2021 11:10:33 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/03/28/dependency-inversion-principle-and-the-dependency-injection-pattern/https://munirhassan.com/2021/03/28/dependency-inversion-principle-and-the-dependency-injection-pattern/Introduction Every day we write lots of code that is tightly coupled, and as complexity grows that code eventually deteriorates into spaghetti code, which violates the Dependency…Sun, 28 Mar 2021 10:37:22 GMThttps://munirhassan.com/2021/03/21/programmatically-unsubscribe-in-sitecore-exm/https://munirhassan.com/2021/03/21/programmatically-unsubscribe-in-sitecore-exm/Sometimes you need to unsubscribe a contact programmatically. For example, you have a legacy third party email management system and whenever a user unsubscribes from an email in…Sun, 21 Mar 2021 09:49:26 GMT