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...
Articles tagged with Productivity
Writing on focus, task management, and getting meaningful work done consistently.
Why Headcount Math Lies
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published and helped cement one of management’s oldest instincts. In simple terms, break work into measurable units, optimize for efficiency, a...
The Janus Protocol
In the Roman Forum, there was a small shrine with double doors. When Rome was at war, the doors were left open. When Rome was at peace, the doors were closed. It is an oddly mod...
Stop Wasting Brainpower
How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too. On the surface, it...
The Weekly Win
If you happen to work for a large organization, you’ve probably heard of quarterly checkins or some similar corporate buzzword to describe what you’ve done and what you could ha...
From Idea to Launch in 2 Weeks
Everyone’s been talking about LLMs. I didn’t want to be too late to the party. When everyone’s talking about doomsdays scenarios, I just wanted to see for myself. As an engineer...
Take Self Reviews Seriously
This isn’t the first and definitely won’t be the last time I find myself in a conversation about the importance of self checkins, performance reviews, and all that socalled “ref...
Learning the Johari Window
When I wrote this piece on , I focused on the practical side: clarity, motivation, breaking down complexity. But here’s the thing. Even the clearest goal doesn't mean much if yo...
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...
Work-Life Balance as a Manager
As an IC, you close your laptop at 6 PM, log off, and forget about the work unless you are oncall. As a manager, you check Slack at 10 PM because someone might need you. Your ca...
Ideal Number of Direct Reports
Amazon’s likely comes from a closer look at ratios. Were there too many managers with only 23 direct reports? That’s entirely possible. From my time at AWS, I didn’t see this mu...
Getting Delegation Right
In software business, leaders often need to delegate the work. Yet, I have seen leaders struggle with it, often saying, “I try to delegate, but it never quite works.” The truth...
Handling Competitive Dynamics
A healthy level of competition can fuel innovation, drive individuals to excel, and push teams to achieve remarkable results. However, when competition crosses the line and beco...
Confronting the Life on Pause
During the COVID lockdowns, I ended up spending more time alone than I was used to. The routines had collapsed, and a lot of the social structure I had taken for granted just di...
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...
Cracking Coding Bottlenecks
In software development, we obsess over component benchmarks and algorithmic complexity, chasing milliseconds latency and BigO wins. But, time and after time, I’ve found that th...
Achieve More by Meeting Less
Meetings are part of leadership. We need them to align and understand. Yet, we often do it at the expense of action. The success lies in the milestones achieved. In essence, "Fe...
Restful Sleep: The Ultimate Debugger
Coding can be tough. Even the best get stuck with tricky errors. But many forget one helpful trick: sleep. Software engineers often work late. We get so into our work, we think,...
Embrace the Unknowns
The first time I landed in a country where I couldn't read a single sign, I spent twenty minutes staring at a metro map trying to figure out which train went toward the city cen...
Missed Opportunities
Itʼs been a while and I havenʼt posted anything new on my blog. Life, work, and priorities often got in the way, but the urge to write never really went away. Itʼs time to get b...
Minimum Viable Agile
In , I criticized agile frameworks for bringing too much complexity with too little impact. What was meant to make teams more adaptive often ends up doing the opposite. They slo...
What's wrong with Agile Frameworks
Some time ago, I attended a course and became . It wasn’t a huge deal. I was already doing the job. But as time went on and I gained more experience, my view of agile frameworks...
How I Work as a Software Engineer
When I started out, I thought productivity meant speed. Ship fast, fix fast, move fast. Working in startups taught me something different. When everything around you changes con...
Çevik Yazılım
Çevik yazılım geliştirme, bir takım yazılım geliştirme yönteminden ibarettir. Bu yöntemler, yazılımın ve gereksinimlerin birbiriyle etkileşim halinde tutarak ortaya koyulmuş sür...