Trial By Fire
Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then th...
#Decision Making
Posts on making sound decisions under uncertainty, trade-offs, and incomplete information.
Capacity Is the Roadmap
When I was young, I worked in carpentry during the summers. Summer was busy. New buildings had to go up. Stables needed repairs. Barns needed extensions. Sheds had to be built o...
The Roadmap Is Not the System
A few years ago, my father decided to build a house in the . On the surface, it was easy to like the idea. A quiet place. A porch. A garden. Somewhere to disappear for a while....
Escaping Status Theater
I still think about one migration project where everything was green until the final month. We did not have the luxury of extending the deadline. This was tied to external regul...
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
Why Politics Appear
Ancient Athens did not solve uncertainty with better communication. They solved it by removing people. Once a year, citizens gathered to vote on exile. Not for crimes. Not for f...
How to Work with Me
In 1935, Boeing had a new bomber prototype, the Model 299, which later became the B17. It was impressive, and it was also easy to mess up because it had more switches and steps...
Multi-Horizon Delivery Framework
If you’ve been in leadership for a while, you know the drill: a line manager reports team progress along with the PM, anyone above reviews it in cadence and sees how things are...
What Good Execution Looks Like
The other day I was talking with one of my directs. We ended up discussing something we’ve both learned over the years. When execution works, the environment is quiet. Not slow....
Managing Your Manager
Managers change more often than you realize, especially when a company is growing or downsizing. New roles, new org charts, new reporting lines. Other times, you’re shopping aro...
AI Broke Interviews
Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and rounds....
Most of What We Call Progress
Most of what we call progress in software is just motion. New tools, new frameworks, same problems. Maybe fancier logos. Our industry always has this collective thrill that a ne...
Managers Have Been Vibe Coding All Along
Everyone’s been talking about vibe coding lately. I’ve been doing it myself. two projects. and . It’s the kind of work where you don’t analyze, architect, or overthink. You star...
Why Over-Engineering Happens
If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched...
Prisoner's Dilemma
On September 3, 1949, a weather plane was flying over Japan. It detected traces of radioactive isotopes. These elements decay quickly, which means they had been created recently...
Onboarding Your Engineering Manager
Bringing on a new leader to your organization is always tricky. It starts with . Then comes the real part. Onboarding! I always think bringing in a new leader without context is...
Technical Deep Dives
When someone asks for a technical deep dive, they don’t care if . They want proof that you actually understand the beast you’ve built. Can you walk me through the system like yo...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Representing the Business
The other day, someone asked me why we even need managers. What do they actually do? I think it’s a fair question, and honestly, people get it wrong a lot. You can throw usual f...
Chasing Real Respect
You can fake a lot of things in business. Authority. Expertise. Competence. But you can’t fake certain , like respect. Think about the managers you’ve had in the past. The good...
Simple Task Management
I don’t have the best memory. Hell, I barely remember what I did yesterday. Over the years, I’ve tried countless apps to track my tasks, but most of them are too complex. Signin...
AI Balance in Work
I use AI, you use AI, and almost everyone uses AI. I don’t think that’s going to change. But how should we use it? I’ve seen people turn five bullet points into three pages — I...
Bridging the Management Disconnect
I’ve seen this happen over and over. A successful engineer . They are eager to build great teams and support their people. They know some of the leaders before didn't do that. T...
Traits for EMs
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many managers, and mentored a few. I was fortunate enough to learn from some great bosses. When I think about it, I feel li...
Overriding a People Leader’s Decision
When managing managers or leaders, there will be times when you feel that the right course of action differs from their opinion. It could be related to rating an employee, decid...
Perception vs Perspective
Have you ever found yourself questioning someone's decision, only to realize later that you didn't have the full picture? You know it's really easy to get caught up in our own w...
Operational Skills Needed
Over the years, I've interviewed many candidates. One crucial skill that often gets overlooked is operational reflexes during oncalls. Surprisingly, few companies test for this,...
Charlie Munger Quotes
I got to know more about Charlie Munger in the last 10 years. His name came up with Berkshire. I knew he had been in the industry, but I wasn’t really into investing. I apprecia...
Leading from Where You Are
When we were building Areca, a realtime billing engine for Turk Telekom, we were a small team competing against giants like Amdocs. They had the brand recognition, the scale, an...
Coding in Leadership
When you start coding, you start the adventure. It feels like unlocking a new world of logic and creativity. From programming classes where we tried to solve pyramid programs to...
The Making of a Leader
Leadership, in my eyes, has always been a blend of natural inclination and learned skills. Reflecting on my own path to becoming a leader, I've realized it's not just about inna...
Leading Self Managing Teams
When I first started leading teams, I thought being a good manager meant being everywhere. I felt like checking every ticket, joining every status update and so on. I got exhaus...
Quick Reflexes in Decision Making
In the fastmoving world of software development, decisions rarely wait for me to feel ready. I’ve lost count of how many times I wished for more data, more clarity, more time bu...
Becoming a Rockstar Engineer
In the software development realm, people often debate about 10x engineers or rockstars. But what does that really mean? How can you become one? There isn’t an easy answer, but...
Estimation Accuracy
Estimating software projects is basically the tech equivalent of arguing about Irish weather. Everyone has an opinion, nobody really knows anything, and the forecast changes all...
Why Legacy Systems Are Worth Your Time
I know. When you hear legacy, you think , , weird edge cases, and “what the hell just broke now.” Every moment feels frustrating. You don’t know what the next change will trigge...
System Design Interviewing Tips
System design interviews are inherently subjective. Outcomes depend on many factors, including the backgrounds of both the interviewer and the candidate. Even if both have exper...
Engineering Strategy and Planning
Strategy is a word that's often used but rarely understood. Ask ten people what it means, and you'll get ten different answers. I often see people confuse it with , a quarterly...
Pulling the Plug from a Project
Every project starts with high hopes to deliver one or more business values. The team begins with the requirement analysis and then carries on with design and development. On th...
Designing A Key-Value Store
I’ve been asked once to design a key value store in an interview. It looks easy at first. Then it gets hard, fast. What makes it interesting is how ambiguous it is. I started us...
Promoting Learnings in Incidents
Incidents are used for the negative consequences of an action. The incident comes from an action that fails to result in the expected outcome. For instance, deploying a code to...
Risk Comes First
You probably saw many cliché stuff about risking everything. Not risking is the biggest risk and all. While there is a truth to that, risk needs to be an appetite. Remember what...
Yazılım Mühendisliği Kariyer Merdiveni
Yazılım şirketleri, mühendislik mesleği seviyelerini dikkatlice oluşturmalı ve çalışanlardan ne beklendiğini, roller arasındaki farkı ve kariyer gelişimi için alanları açıklayan...
Hype in Software Development
We live in a time when every month brings a new framework, library, or architectural pattern that promises to change everything. Increasingly often, we come across a new technol...
How Teams Choose Language
Choosing a programming language is one of the most defining decisions in software development. It shapes how a team writes, maintains, and reasons about their system. Today, the...
Java Developer vs. Software Engineer
Java developer vs. software engineer is discussed quite often, especially among programmers trying to define what truly separates a coder from an engineer. One of my friends kep...