Experience•
Born without a street
Hospitality inherited foot traffic. Six months into the industry, I'm learning what customer data can reveal without changing the welcome at the table.
Articles
What I've learned building software and working with the people around it.
Engineering•
Architecture without phases is just a diagram
The target architecture was usually clear. The route there rarely accounted for the team doing the work.
Experience•
What a strange correlation can and can't tell you
We used odd correlations to help moderators choose which threads to read. Years later, I found a pattern in financial data that we decided to leave alone.
Engineering•
AI coding advice is rediscovering the Agile Manifesto
AI coding advice is rediscovering an old lesson: clear code, visible architecture, and useful tests beat another page of instructions.
Engineering•
What AI coding taught me about micromanagement
We spent years complaining about micromanagers, then gave AI the same over-specified briefs and bloated documentation.
Engineering•
Micro-frontends won't fix your monolith
A tangled frontend can make every change expensive. Splitting the deployment may only move the coordination work somewhere else.
Trust•
Trust wasn't the first thing this team could fix
A struggling engineering group tried the trust exercises. Three months later, people were still hoarding information and second-guessing decisions.
Trust•
Trust isn't a gift you give on day one
On day one, a manager can offer room, support, and the benefit of the doubt. Trust grows from what happens next.
Engineering•
AI coding is a trust problem
AI taught me to ask how a confident claim was checked. The same question exposes weak feedback loops in teams and leadership.
Leadership•
What new hires notice
A new hire notices the problems everyone else has learned to step around. Their first month is organizational feedback, if anyone is willing to hear it.
Leadership•
Remote teams and the 2/3 pattern
A remote team looked healthy until its manager left and half the team followed. The conversations that explained it had been happening in private.
Engineering•
Developers aren't being replaced, but coding might be
AI changed my workflow before it changed my job: the tool no longer gets to decide when the work is done.
Trust•
A moment can undo years of trust
A ten-second blame session changed how a team behaved for years. The response to failure says more than a culture survey.
Engineering•
The architect's job is to be wrong first
My team rebuilt the architecture I proposed. I now judge that first sketch by how easily they could challenge and improve it.
Community•
Write about your community, not for them
The community managers I worked with were posting constantly. Members joined in more when we started writing about what they were doing.
Experience•
Using punctuation to prioritize the moderation queue
About 15 years ago, tiny details such as punctuation helped us decide which conversations needed a moderator's attention first.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
The 2/3 pattern appears at more than one scale
I thought the 2/3 cycle followed company growth. Then I started seeing it inside teams, departments, and individual projects.
Technology•
What Sweden's Home PC Reform may have changed
I went looking for one policy that explained Sweden's tech lead over Denmark. The comparison became less tidy as soon as I checked the details.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
Good boss, good product, good team: pick two
The same joke kept turning up: good boss, good product, good team. Pick two. I started looking for the pattern behind it.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
The three pillars: leadership, product, and team
Leadership, strategy, and team health can each look convincing until the work puts them under pressure. These are the tests I use.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
Why two strong pillars can weaken the third
A fintech team ignored customer requests. A SaaS company shipped through burnout. In both, success gave people a reason to keep going.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
Why good leaders don't always build great teams
Before a two-week vacation, a leader asked the team to choose between two approaches. They wanted to know what the leader would choose.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
Why organizational focus keeps moving
One organization tried to repair leadership, strategy, and team at the same time. The transition was more than the system could absorb.
Leadership•
How engineers and business people handle uncertainty
A word as ordinary as customer can expose how differently engineers and business colleagues handle uncertainty. Architects have to work inside that gap.
Engineering•
Service architecture is deliberate debt
At my first job, we split an unwieldy monolith into services. The extra complexity was deliberate, and it gave the team room to learn.
Leadership•
Show me your codebase
Ten years ago, I declined a whiteboard exercise and asked to see the company's code. I've used real code in interviews ever since.
Engineering•
Technical debt is a tool
I used to treat technical debt like a failure. Thinking in interest rates gave me a more useful way to judge it.
Experience•
You don't know it until you've done it
My wife understood the idea in her computer science class, but she couldn't make it work. I remembered how often books had given me the same false confidence.
Engineering•
A story should be able to ship on its own
A backlog can look orderly and still leave every task waiting on another. Vertical slices give the team something it can actually ship.
Community•
Mentoring keeps exposing gaps in what I know
A junior developer asked why we use dependency injection. My practiced answer lasted until their second question.