The Blog
Notes from inside the room.
Practical essays for senior engineers and engineering leaders, drawn from the work itself: leading engineers well, building and scaling teams and functions from zero, leading in the AI era, and leveling up your own craft. The deepest pieces go out first to the weekly letter.
The Second Platform Is the Hard One
The first one gets greenfield grace and a launch story. The second one gets compared, inherits your last set of answers, and decides whether you have a discipline or one good build.
Read essay → Platform leadershipThe Standard That Could Make MCP Look Small
Anthropic just previewed a shared language for AI agents to run lab and factory equipment. The pilot results are stronger than anything MCP shipped with at launch. The honest case for why it could matter more, and why it is not there yet.
Read essay → Platform leadershipA Platform Nobody Adopts Is Just a Library
The difference between a platform and a library is not architecture, headcount, or how the org chart labels your team. It is whether a team with a real alternative chose you anyway.
Read essay → Platform leadershipPlatform After Platform: What Actually Transfers
Content at Yahoo, data and seller experience at Amazon, payments at PayPal, IoT at Bosch, e-pharmacy, wealth. The domain changes every time. The hard part never does.
Read essay → Engineering leadershipThe Bar Raiser Is Not There to Raise the Bar on Candidates
After a bad hire, most orgs reach for harder questions and one more round. That is the wrong lever. Your hiring bar is capped by the evidence your interviewers produce, not by the candidates you see.
Read essay → Leveling upWhat to Actually Learn at Each Stage of an Engineering Career (in the AI Era)
One staircase, many doorways. Whatever stack you came in through, the climb is the same. What to learn at every rung, junior to leader, and how the AI era changed what each rung rewards.
Read essay → Leading in the AI eraThe Manager's Job Changes When the IC Has AI
When your engineers are AI-amplified, throughput stops being the bottleneck and direction becomes it. The manager's job shifts from unblocking to aiming.
Read essay → Leading in the AI eraHow to Transition Your Team to AI-Native (Without the Theatre)
Most AI adoption is theatre: mandated tools, vanity metrics, demos that change nothing. Going AI-native is a workflow change, not a tool purchase. How to do it for real.
Read essay → Building & scalingThe Platform Team Trap: When Building Tools Becomes the Job
Internal platform teams drift into building tools nobody chose. The fix is to treat your platform like a product with customers who are allowed to say no.
Read essay → Building & scalingOn-Call Without Burning People Out
On-call burnout is not the price of running reliable systems. It is a design choice leaders make by neglect. How to build a rotation people can carry for years.
Read essay → Building & scalingHow to Bootstrap an SRE Function From Scratch
Standing up reliability engineering is an org-design problem, not a hiring problem. How to start one from nothing, in the right order, so it earns its seat instead of becoming a second on-call rotation.
Read essay → Leveling upSenior Is a Trap
The habits that made you a great senior engineer are exactly what stall you before staff. The shift from output to leverage, and how to make it on purpose.
Read essay → Leading in the AI eraAI Won't Take Your Job. It Will Raise the Bar for Judgment.
As AI commoditizes writing code, the scarce skill becomes taste, judgment, and system thinking: the same things that decide who gets promoted.
Read essay → Engineering leadershipThe Promo Packet Is a Leadership Artifact, Not Paperwork
The best engineering leaders don't write promo docs once a cycle. They use them year-round as the single best tool for growing, and keeping, their strongest engineers.
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