For people who know me, it might be surprising to hear how much I love people 🙂. Especially the folks on the teams I’ve managed over the years. They’re relentlessly talented, curious, funny, stubborn in all the right ways, and full of these rich inner worlds that have nothing to do with their job titles. They’re engineers, yeah - but they’re also cooks, musicians, parents, painters, marathon runners, woodworkers, travelers, and everything in between. I genuinely love hearing their stories. Wher...
Building mPath: A Tool for Managing the Chaos
I’ve been working on a tool meant to help me as an engineering manager, but somewhere along the way I realized it could be helpful to others too. Building it forced me to step back and think about where an engineering manager’s pain points are most pronounced. What I kept coming back to were two things: tracking large-scale initiatives over time, and understanding the health and happiness of the team. They’re connected, but distinct enough to deserve their own focus. I like to organize work into...
Deciding on Technology
Deciding what type of technical solution to use is always shaped by three main constraints: the limits of technology, the capabilities of the team, and the long-term needs of the organization. Each introduces uncertainty, and understanding their role is critical. For most application and web development, technology isn’t the limiting factor. Nearly every problem has multiple viable solutions already available. Real limits usually appear in fields like AI, game development, physical sciences, med...
Managing Time with Todoist and AI
Like many engineering managers, my responsibilities shift from week to week. Tasks rarely line up neatly, and constant context switching can be exhausting. The only way I keep from drowning in it is by regrouping every week. Without that reset, the buildup of concerns can get overwhelming fast. Since my memory isn’t exactly reliable, I lean on tools to keep me organized. Todoist is my external brain. It’s simple to use, backed by an intuitive API, and perfect for both quick capture and easy retr...
Complexity and Context
I was recently thinking about why we get such different reports about the benefits of AI in software development. One person’s transcendent experience is another person’s waste of time. I think there are lots of reasons but one of them that seems particularly relevant in the work that I do has to do with the relationship between the code being written and how close it is to the consumer. The closer we get to the consumer when developing code (think “frontend”), the more commonality there ten...