The Most Dangerous Words in Software Engineering: “We All Agree”
I once let a consensus convince me that a decision was right simply because the people supporting it were smarter and more experienced than I was. M…
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So.... The Chief Architect Vanished
This week at the synthetic company, something genuinely strange happened. The chief architect vanished. Not metaphorically. Not in the “he got poach…
You Have Been Asked to Represent Your Team at the Architecture Review
Your company has a fortnightly architecture review. Leads and senior engineers from every team, an hour on a call, proposals for anything that cross…
A Week in the Seat: What a Fractional Integrator Actually Does, Day by Day
A Fractional Integrator is easy to describe badly. "Runs meetings." "Follows up with people." "Helps operations." None of those explanations really…
When Not to Hire a Fractional Integrator (and What to Do Instead)
A Fractional Integrator can help when execution keeps breaking between teams. But sometimes hiring one is the wrong move. The company may have a pro…
The Death of the Sampling Shelter: Why Full-Population AI Audits Will Expose Fragile Product Teams
The death of the sampling shelter means that enterprise systems and product workflows will no longer be evaluated through small, forgiving statistic…
Profit & Loss (P&L) for Engineering Leaders
Most engineering leaders can tell you their sprint velocity, their deployment frequency, and their open incident count. Far fewer can tell you what…
Managing Cross-Functional Teams: A Practical Guide for Engineering Leaders
Cross-functional teams are where most modern software gets built. Product defines the problem, design shapes the experience, engineering builds the…
Your Founder's Personal Brand Should Work Like a Bootloader
Engineering teams will spend an entire quarter removing a single point of failure from a payments service, then never ask the same question about th…
Ceremony proportional to irreversibility: Type 1 vs Type 2 engineering decisions
By Decision Desk Every engineering team eventually has the same argument. One group says "we need more design review, we keep shipping things we reg…
How Engineering Team Structure Shapes Software Delivery
An engineering team can have experienced developers, a clear backlog, and regular sprint meetings while still struggling to ship. Sometimes the miss…
Your Team Got Faster With AI. Why Is Your First Move a Layoff?
Suppose your implementation team finally gets an AI workflow working. It produces useful first drafts of integrations, catches routine mistakes, and…
People: Bus Factor, Expectations and Day One
Part of the "How to bring order to a project" series — the people track. It comes after infrastructure and architecture not because it matters less,…
Stop Optimizing for Output: Why Software Engineering is a Discovery Problem
Most engineering organizations misdiagnose software delivery as a production problem. They treat building software like operating a factory: crank t…
How to Bring Order to a Project: A Track Map
Every now and then I join a project where "everything works, but nobody dares to touch it." Deployment is done by hand from memory, the architecture…
Agentic Methods for a Tech Lead
Agentic Methods: Coding With AI Agents, Designing For Agents TL;DR "Agentic methods" covers two distinct things colliding right now: AI agents that…
The False ROI of Fear: Why Threat-Based Management Destroys Engineering Velocity
Threat-based management is a systemic failure masquerading as operational rigor. When leaders manage exclusively by highlighting errors, they trigge…
Nine categories: how engineering manager interviews actually get scored
Most EM interview prep fails the same way. You pick three strong stories, polish them until they're tight, run them past a friend, and walk in confi…
Sometimes the Fastest System Is the One Willing to Stop
There is a particular kind of meeting every engineer eventually attends. A metric is projected onto a screen. It has moved in the wrong direction. S…
AI Operating Model: Why Scaling AI Is an Organisational Design Problem
AI adoption is getting easier. Scaling AI is not. Models are more capable. APIs are easier to access. Copilots can be deployed quickly. Teams can pr…
The Fastest Way to Become a Senior Engineer Is to Make Yourself Replaceable
Why helping everyone around you grow is still the fastest path to career growth—even in the age of AI. Introduction One of the best pieces of career…
Technology Is Rarely the Only Constraint
A technology problem rarely stays a technology problem for very long. A platform may need to scale. A product may need to move faster. An organisati…
AI Predictions, August 2026
For the past two months or so, I've been working on a variety of AI development projects rather than writing -- writing skills, plugins, workflows,…
Leadership Mistakes We Put Into Production Before Lunch
Six management failures we shipped alongside perfectly valid infrastructure changes. At 11:42 on Monday, the billing-export pull request had four ap…
My type of #FractionalCTO
Let's begin this with, what is a #FractionalCTO? A Fractional CTO is an experienced, executive-level technology leader who provides strategic guidan…
The Timezone Gap Isn't a Bug, It's a Forcing Function
Here's a hard truth most engineering leaders don't say out loud: your team's speed depends way too much on people being in the same room at the same…
AI Adoption Is Not an Operating Model
The investor mandate was unambiguous: become AI-native immediately and establish an advantage before the market caught up. The organization responde…
Faster PRs, Weaker Instincts: The Judgment Problem in AI-Assisted Engineering
I thought the dashboard was telling me good news. My team had adopted AI-assisted coding quickly, and for a while it looked like exactly what everyo…
10 AI Prompts I Use as an Engineering Manager (1:1s, Postmortems, Performance Reviews)
10 AI Prompts I Use as an Engineering Manager I've managed engineering teams for long enough to know the pattern: half of the job is technical decis…
Top 26 Engineering Newsletters Actually Worth Your Inbox
Everyone recommends ByteByteGo and The Pragmatic Engineer. Don't get me wrong, they're great... but the best engineering writing of the last two yea…