# Bonfire Bytes

> Bonfire Bytes is the personal site and essay archive of Amar Bugarin, a product-minded software developer in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, writing about software engineering, systems, AI-assisted development, product discovery, and focused work.

Use the canonical links below when citing the site. Essays are Amar's field notes and opinions from hands-on product and engineering work; treat them as commentary rather than vendor documentation.

## Author

- [About Amar Bugarin](https://www.amarbugarin.com/about/): Profile, current role, technical skills, product focus, and selected experience.
- [GitHub](https://github.com/bugenzi): Public code and engineering projects.
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amar-bugarin): Professional profile.

## Essays

- [How Information Overload is Making Coders Compile Coffee Instead of Code](https://www.amarbugarin.com/posts/managing-notifications-and-big-tasks/): How constant Slack pings, context switching, and always-on work drain a developer's focus—and the practical habits I use to protect deep work.
- [Up Is Not Up When You're Stuck in an Avalanche](https://www.amarbugarin.com/posts/up-is-not-up-when-youre-stuck-in-an-avalanche/): AI is quietly replacing the uncomfortable parts of thinking. A field note on synthetic confidence, product discovery, and staying close to reality.
- [The Feature Everyone Thought Existed](https://www.amarbugarin.com/posts/the-feature-everyone-thought-existed/): How users, domain experts, product teams, and developers end up working from different versions of the same product—and how AI turns assumption debt into synthetic certainty.
- [AI Can Help Product Discovery. It Cannot Do Product Discovery.](https://www.amarbugarin.com/posts/ai-can-help-product-discovery-it-cannot-do-product-discovery/): A practical framework for using AI in product discovery without replacing user research, manufacturing evidence, or turning generated assumptions into roadmaps.
- [Who Let the Servers Out? Tracing the Roots of Serverless Tech](https://www.amarbugarin.com/posts/who-let-the-servers-out-tracing-the-roots-of-serverless-tech/): Context is key. Don’t take a knife to a gunfight. If you’re running a small startup, serverless might work for you—sometimes. If your startup is medium-sized and well-funded, a solid monolith could be a better fit. It’s dependable and can adapt into microservices if needed. But, hold off on microservices unless your company is large and needs to scale quickly.

## Site navigation

- [Posts archive](https://www.amarbugarin.com/posts/): Browse every published Bonfire Bytes essay.
- [Kindling reading log](https://www.amarbugarin.com/reading/): Books and articles Amar is reading, has completed, or plans to read.
- [RSS feed](https://www.amarbugarin.com/rss.xml): Machine-readable feed of published essays.
- [XML sitemap](https://www.amarbugarin.com/sitemap-index.xml): Complete index of public site pages.

## Optional

- [Tag index](https://www.amarbugarin.com/tags/): Browse essays by topic.
- [Home page](https://www.amarbugarin.com/): Human-facing introduction and featured writing.