Career
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Specific, Soon, and About the Work
I spent a good chunk of my career at a logistics startup where we thought “radical transparency” meant shouting critiques during sprint reviews. It was…
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Teach Them to Find It, Not Just Fix It
I spent most of my early career thinking that mentoring meant sitting someone down for a structured lecture on design patterns or reviewing their clean…
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Bringing Evidence to an Argument You Might Lose
I spent most of my twenties thinking that knowing how to disagree with a senior engineer meant mastering some complex, corporate-approved “communication framework” or learning…
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End the Meeting With a Decision
I once sat through a three-hour meeting where four senior engineers argued about whether to use a graph database or a relational one, while the…
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A Design Doc Nobody Dreads Reading
I once spent three weeks drafting a forty-page technical specification for a new payment gateway, complete with exhaustive diagrams of every microservice interaction and a…
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Explain the Risk in Money and Time
I once spent three weeks building a slide deck filled with complex architectural diagrams and latency percentiles, thinking I was being thorough. I walked into…
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Negotiating Scope Instead of Time
I remember sitting in a dimly lit office at a logistics startup back in 2016, staring at a Jira ticket that was mathematically impossible to…
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Say It Early, Say It Once, Say What Changes
I remember sitting in a glass-walled conference room at my old insurance firm, staring at a spreadsheet that was a complete work of fiction. My…
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Three Lines Beat Three Paragraphs
I spent three years at a logistics startup where “status updates” were essentially long-form essays masquerading as progress reports. We had these elaborate templates and…
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Bring the Question With the Work Attached
I remember sitting in a dark apartment during my time at that logistics startup, staring at a trace log that made absolutely no sense, feeling…