Generated and suppressed demand. đź”—
Eight years ago, I wrote about my theory of restoring struggling teams, which came down to four steps: A team is falling behind if each week their bac [...]
Irrational Exuberance
Posts
Make no assumptions. đź”—
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the concept of “soil horizons”, which is the idea that there are many distinct layers of soil, from topsoil al [...]
Revised rules of engineering leadership. đź”—
From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature o [...]
Early and late-stage hypergrowth. đź”—
Last week, a colleague asked why I’d hired an additional new leader onto an important area rather than expanding an existing leader’s scope to incorpo [...]
Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks. đź”—
One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improvin [...]
The agentic passive voice. đź”—
At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice, where the actor in a sentence is unclear. For example, my software didn’t compile. That’ [...]
Judgment and creativity are all you need. đź”—
When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete. Our database migrations wer [...]
Refactoring internal documentation in Notion đź”—
In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentation was the area with the second most comments. This is a writeup of the concrete steps I t [...]
Should you include engineers in your leadership meetings? đź”—
While Staff Engineer was first and foremost an attempt to pull the industry towards my perspective on staff-plus engineering roles, writing it also ch [...]