Article Series
Follow multi-part stories and tutorials
New Manager Guide
A practical guide to becoming an engineering manager: why people pursue it, what the identity shift feels like, and what first-time managers miss.
Managing People
How to manage direct reports well: building trust, giving real feedback, delegating effectively, handling performance, and making the hard calls.
Running Engineering Teams
How to run an engineering team: structure, delivery systems, onboarding engineers, building culture, and the mechanics that make organizations work.
Org Dynamics
The organizational forces shaping engineering execution: cross-team dependencies, incentive misalignment, politics, planning cycles, and business pressure.
Engineering Craft
Software engineering best practices for working engineers: how strong engineers read code, run reviews, stay consistent, and build disciplined habits.
Software Judgment
Technical decision-making under real constraints: when to refactor, how to manage technical debt, designing better APIs, and avoiding fake progress.
Production and Reliability
What software engineering looks like under production pressure: debugging hard problems, handling incidents, managing overload, building for reliability.
Engineering Career
Software engineering career advice that holds up: how to read career signals, manage your boss, navigate interviews, and build a long career well.
Personal Systems
Productivity systems for engineers and managers: setting goals, building focus habits, recovering from burnout, turning intention into consistent output.
Engineering Strategy and Vision
How to build and execute an engineering strategy: setting technical direction, sequencing work, managing roadmap pressure, and making real trade-offs.
Designing Systems
Software system design in practice: drawing boundaries, managing state, designing APIs and data contracts, handling overload, and distributed trade-offs.
Engineering Friction
The hidden costs slowing engineering teams down: cognitive load, process bottlenecks, status theatre, context switching, and the tax that drains velocity.