Essays and notes from sixteen years of engineering work.
I write when something I have seen often enough becomes worth naming. The essays here start from specific situations rather than from theory, and they try to be useful to someone in a similar situation rather than to sound smart at a distance.
Code Is Getting Cheaper. Why Are We Still Managing Delivery by Hand?
Coding agents are making execution cheaper, but software delivery still depends on people reconciling goals, plans, decisions, dependencies, code, review and release. This is the problem I am trying to move into the system with The Tam.
AI and Engineering LeadershipBypassable by design: the architecture problem behind AI governance theatre
Why most AI 'human oversight' is bypassable by design — advisory client-side checks an agent can route around — and what it takes to move oversight server-side, into the architecture and the procurement contract.
AI governance architectureAI Did Not Replace Management. It Exposed Why Good Management Matters.
On why the organizations that never quite understood how to lead people are now failing to understand AI in exactly the same way — and for the same reasons.
AI and engineering leadershipFriction Is Not Rigor: The Economics of Bad Senior Hiring
On the difference between rigorous senior hiring loops and expensive, badly bounded evaluation systems that mistake their own friction for a high bar.
Senior hiring economicsThe Indispensable Role of Onboarding in Software Development Teams
On structured onboarding for engineers across levels — how the process differs for juniors, seniors, and managers, and why company-wide and team-specific onboarding solve different problems.
Engineering managementKISS your SOLID frontend code to keep it DRY (Part 1)
On applying SOLID, KISS, and DRY/DIE principles to frontend engineering — written in 2021 after eight years in the field, and still where most frontend complexity actually goes wrong.
Engineering practice