Notes on enginering leadership and software development.
#engineering-leadership
2025
Make your own growth plans, brag lists, prepare promotion packages, and for the love of gawd start writing.
Here's how I work, how to work with me, and known failure modes.
Half of your job is to handle surprises. Some of those come from above. The kicker is you can learn to see the surprises brewing before the shitstorm hits. You've seen this movie before.
I've been here a year, here's what I have to show for it.
2024
Career growth advice for junior engineers on remote teams.
You 👏 won't 👏 grow 👏 without 👏 stetch 👏 goals.
2023
Lead your teams with integrity, honesty, and transparency. Don't let fear and cynicism poison the team.
How to lead a team in remote-first environment, and establish the communication systems and standards so that your team moves quickly, and people are healthy and happy and don't get routinely overwhelmed with notifications.
Saying "No" is extremely valuable. But not just for you — for your team and larger organization as well. Here's how.
Things to do to get to know your new team, and start building trust.
How to quickly check-in with your team, and make sure people feel safe, supported, and motivated, in a remote environment.
2022
Here's a minimal set of signals I'm looking for when interviewing engineering managers.
What role you play for each person on your team, and in your organization.
Switching back and forth between engineering and engineering management is totally fine.
Daily Notes
May 7th:
The Weekly Mind MeldCatching up on newsletters, I love the mind meld idea.
It's how I continually open up my thoughts to the team with a long-term goal to reduce any mental alignment gap between us. I like to think that the more I share, the more they can understand what I believe is important and why.
I love short, async project updates that follow a consistent structure, but reading the essay, I looked at it from a new angle: it's a newsletter, or a blog, but for folks that you work with. You care that they read it, so you want to make it interesting, engaging, flowing well, and concise (under 1500 words). Especially if you support a team of teams (or a larger org), this is such a great tool to have.