Start typing to search through all blog posts, titles, and tags.
💡 Pro tip: Use ⌘K to open search anytime
/Practical tools, real-world lessons, and honest reflections on engineering leadership
When does your organization actually feel the loss of someone important? Not on the day they leave. And usually not in the first month either. Often not until three to six months later, when a critical decision stalls or a system breaks in a way nobody quite understands. That gap, between when something happens and when the system actually registers it, is one of the most underestimated forces in organizational life.
Open your calendar and look at the next week without reading any titles. Just look at the colors. If you can't immediately tell which days will drain you and which ones have space to think, your calendar isn't working for you.
You don’t build safety in offsites. You build it in how you respond when someone messes up or disagrees.
The bus factor is a simple yet powerful way to think about execution risk in engineering organizations. It refers to the number of people who would need to suddenly disappear before a project stalls because the remaining team lacks the knowledge or capability to continue. That disappearance could be someone quitting, getting hit by a bus, taking extended leave, or simply being pulled onto another priority.
Not every decision deserves a meeting. But try telling that to some organizations, where even choosing a linting rule somehow requires stakeholder alignment and a follow-up meeting.
If you've been anywhere near AI tooling lately, you've probably heard about MCPs. Let me break down what MCP actually is, why it exists, and how it differs from the RESTful paradigm we've all grown comfortable with.
You spend hours on your presentation. You rehearse in the shower. You nail the delivery. Then Greg from finance raises his hand: "Yeah, but what about X?" Dammit, Greg. Here's how to Greg-proof your next pitch.
After 10 years of watching companies implement OKRs, I've seen them do two things: transform organizations or become another dreaded management ritual that everyone ignores. The difference isn't the framework itself. It's understanding that OKRs aren't just about setting goals. They're about creating alignment, focus, and outcomes that actually matter. In this blog post, I share what I've learned.
