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.
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Essays and field notes on software, leadership, communities, trust, data, and technology.
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.
Read articleExperience•
What a strange correlation can and can't tell you
A pile of moderation reports taught me that finding a useful correlation is only the beginning. You still have to decide whether to use it.
Read articleEngineering•
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.
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What AI coding taught me about micromanagement
We spent years complaining about micromanagers, then gave AI the same over-specified briefs and bloated documentation.
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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.
Read articleTrust•
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.
Read articleTrust•
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.
Read articleEngineering•
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.
Read articleLeadership•
Onboarding is a feedback loop for organizational health
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.
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Remote teams and the 2/3 pattern
Feedback loops that happen naturally in an office have to be deliberately built when you're not in the same room.
Read articleEngineering•
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.
Read articleTrust•
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.
Read articleEngineering•
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.
Read articleCommunity•
Write about your community, not for them
When a company carries every conversation, members learn to wait. Communities grow when the people inside them become the story.
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The punctuation told us which threads would explode
About 15 years ago, tiny details such as punctuation helped us decide which conversations needed a moderator's attention first.
Read articleLeadership••Part of series: 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.
Read articleTechnology•
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.
Read articleLeadership••Part of series: 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.
Read articleLeadership••Part of series: 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.
Read articleLeadership••Part of series: Good team, good product, good manager
Why two strong pillars can weaken the third
Across three combinations, visible success made a growing weakness easier to dismiss. The context changed, but that pattern kept returning.
Read articleLeadership••Part of series: Good team, good product, good manager
Why good leaders don't always build great teams
A successful team went silent when its leader took a holiday. Years of clear direction had taught everyone to wait for the answer.
Read articleLeadership••Part of series: 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.
Read articleLeadership•
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.
Read articleEngineering•
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.
Read articleLeadership•
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.
Read articleEngineering•
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.
Read articleExperience•
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.
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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.
Read articleCommunity•
Mentoring taught me more than it taught them
A junior developer asked why we use dependency injection. My practiced answer lasted until their second question.
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