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Ground Decisions
→: Ground DecisionsPlanes don’t fly themselves – they just cruise themselves. Takeoff, landing, and the big decisions happen with humans. Same with AI. What are the ground decisions in the software factory era?
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What’s Your Job as an Engineering Manager?
→: What’s Your Job as an Engineering Manager?As a manager, maybe you start your day looking at your calendar, or the pings that are already piling up. It can be easy to get caught up in what people are asking of you – but your job needs to look beyond the requests and into the causes underlying them. Here’s what I think…
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The Spreadsheet: Using AI to Understand How I Spend My Time
→: The Spreadsheet: Using AI to Understand How I Spend My TimeFor years, I’ve known intellectually that my best days aren’t my busiest days. That sustainable productivity requires balancing multiple priorities. That beating myself up about not accomplishing “enough” is counterproductive. But knowing something intellectually and remembering it when you need to are very different things. So a couple of months ago I started trying something…
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What Raccoon Are You Quiz (and some thoughts on vibe coding)
→: What Raccoon Are You Quiz (and some thoughts on vibe coding)Raccoons are very much part of my brand, so many friends (and my boss) sent me the latest adventures of the drunken raccoon in the liquor store. The past couple of years I’ve also been framing my talks about tech as we used to be instagram raccoons – and now we all live in Toronto.…
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Announcing: The Engineering Manager Survival Guide
→: Announcing: The Engineering Manager Survival GuideOne of the biggest issues I saw running remote teams for the past decade+ was the lack of good engineering manager training. With a global team it’s harder (and more expensive) to get everyone in the same place at one time. With a small team, the cost of doing anything custom is infeasible. To help…
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Performance Reviews Are the Scorecard of Capitalism (And Why That Should Free You)
→: Performance Reviews Are the Scorecard of Capitalism (And Why That Should Free You)Every review season is an emotional rollercoaster. Anxiety. Self assessments. Anticipation. Disappointment. As an IC, I felt like how much it impacted me was a personal failure. As a manager, I learned that review season trauma is pervasive. The worst thing about all of it, I think, is how much people take it out on…
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Scaling Teams: People, Projects, and Process
→: Scaling Teams: People, Projects, and ProcessScaling teams is one of my favourite things to do – probably because it’s where people meet systems, with ever-changing questions about what makes teams effective and how to balance now versus next. Sometimes this gets presented in a pure numbers way, but I like to come at it from a systems perspective: Engineering teams…
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Spring Cleaning in December
→: Spring Cleaning in DecemberI used to have a habit of refreshing my website at the end of each year, but I missed a couple and then it became in my head a bigger project that was a discouraging combination of feeling both pointless and overwhelming. But on a productive tear (with Claude) during the winter break, I finally…
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Q4 2025
→: Q4 2025I like the idea of doing a quarterly review of my annual theme, as a way to reset, re-evaluate, figure out what I want to change and celebrate what I did actually accomplish. I set my intention for the year as “health”, and in Q4 I returned to myself as a creative being. I read…