Code Is No Longer the Asset. Workflows Are the New Commodity.
May 10 · 8 min read · The Builder Who Builds Too Fast Imagine you're hiring a contractor to build your house. You get three bids. Two of them say six months. One says three weeks. Your gut reaction to the three-week bid? Something's wrong. They must be cutting corners. Th...
Join discussionRepeat Incidents Are a Leadership Smell
May 8 · 8 min read · We shipped a release, something broke, customer service called, and we fixed it ... then the same issue hit the next release and we applied the same fix again. That is the moment this became clear for me. Pager rotation answers who gets alerted, and ...
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You're Promoting Confidence, Not Leadership
May 7 · 8 min read · A contractor lead walked into our org with strong language, strong opinions, and all the right lead-shaped signals ... then a basic desktop and mobile navigation effort took about 6 months. That gap is why I say if your system rewards how someone sou...
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Most 1:1s Are Career Drift Meetings
May 6 · 8 min read · He looked me in the eye in a 1:1 and asked, "What do I need to do to get to the next level?" He was hungry, driven, and teachable ... and had no clear road to run on. That is when I was reminded that most 1:1s fail because they pretend to be developm...
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Your Team Is One PTO Away from Missing the Quarter
May 5 · 8 min read · Monday morning, one engineer was out on PTO and three separate workstreams were already blocked before lunch. Slack filled with "quick question" pings nobody else could answer, and standup turned into a scavenger hunt for missing context. By Wednesda...
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Mastering the Art of Handling Difficult Conversations: A Lifestyle of Open Communication
May 4 · 2 min read · We’ve all been there. You’re staring at a Slack message from a teammate that completely misses the mark on a technical requirement. Instead of jumping on a quick call, you spend an hour drafting a passive-aggressive reply, delete it, and then just fi...
Join discussionHow to Unblock Your AI PR Review Bottleneck: A Tech Lead’s Guide to Building a Codebase-Aware Reviewer
May 4 · 36 min read · A few months ago, I was reviewing a pull request that added three new API endpoints. The diff was clean. Tests passed. The agent that generated it had even written sensible authorisation checks. By ev
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What I Do in the First 30 Days With a New Engineering Team
May 4 · 8 min read · Most founders who bring in a fractional engineering leader are looking for the same thing: engineering momentum. Not activity — engineers are almost always busy — but directed motion. Work that compounds toward something, where effort today makes tom...
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