I build engineering organizations that ship great products.
I've spent 22 years in engineering and the last 11 as the technical executive responsible for building engineering orgs that deliver real business results.
At my core, I'm a process thinker. Whether it's ... more
Playbooks
Hard-won frameworks.
Structured approaches to the engineering leadership problems that come up again and again.
01
Hiring your first remote engineer
Volume, vetting, verification, and velocity. The playbook founders learn the hard way.
Available 02
Building engineering teams that ship
Topology, cognitive load, and incentive design.
Coming soon 03
AI-leveraged development
How to build AI processes that are robust and effective.
Coming soon 04
Incident response at scale
When 10 minutes down costs $5,000, you learn fast.
Coming soon Writing
Things I've figured out.
The Great Em Dash Panic of 2024 Was Wrong
Everyone said em dashes were a tell for AI-generated content. I analyzed 80 million words from Hacker News going back to 2018. They were wrong.
The Sh*t Sandwich is Wrong: You Need More Bread
The classic feedback sandwich produces medium-performing teams. High-performing teams run at a 5.6:1 ratio of positive to negative comments.
How do you know if you've unlocked the full intellectual capacity of your organization?
The bottleneck isn't talent. It's permission. When information lives at the frontlines but approval authority sits at the top, even the best people learn to wait rather than act.
I'm a former CTO. Here is the 15 sec coding test I used to instantly filter out 50% of unqualified applicants.
A knockout question embedded in the application form. It's so simple that only unqualified developers won't solve it in their head.