Leadership
Managing, leading and growing engineering teams.
Updated
Wednesday 7 October
Tuesday 6 October
The state of the tech industry in 2026
A look into what has changed, what’s still the same – and what’s broken – in the tech industry. The full video and the summary of my keynote at LDX3 New York
22 min read
12 things I miss since coding died
The satisfaction of debugging, rabbit holes, and 10 more
8 min read
Monday 5 October
Lessons From 4 Years of Writing the Engineering Leadership Newsletter
How I started with the newsletter, the most important lessons and what I would tell myself 4 years ago!
9 min read
Before You Build, Ask Yourself: Who is Your Bullseye Customer?
A shared customer hypothesis can resolve decisions that a month of roadmap debate can’t.
5 min read
Friday 2 October
How to Develop a Proactive Mindset as an Engineer
An adapted chapter from my upcoming book “The Multiplier Mindset”, published by O’Reilly.
Paid
Refactoring Street Fighter With AI 🕹️ — with Adam Tornhill
Watch now (54 mins) | Refactoring Podcast • Episode 73
PaidPodcast
Thursday 1 October
The Pulse: Firebase’s global outage & poor response
Also: OpenAI’s platform play that has similarities to AWS, more data on companies moving to open models, and more
Paid
When Building Gets Easy, Who Holds It All Together?
10 reads on the human work that holds engineering teams together
7 min read
Wednesday 30 September
Distributed databases with Peter Mattis
Cockroach Labs co-founder Peter Mattis discusses building reliable distributed systems and how AI helps him write more code without sacrificing quality.
Podcast
How to Run Good Agents in Production 🚦
The third part of our series about orchestration and governance
Paid
Tuesday 29 September
Why has Shopify dropped React Native?
It’s only been a year since the e-commerce platform declared it was very happy with React Native, but now Shopify is dumping it – and the reason, unsurprisingly, is AI
Paid
Monday 28 September
Don’t Mistake Friendliness For Friendship
Being close to your team and being their manager are not the same, and the two run on different rules.
6 min read
Sunday 27 September
How Companies Assess Fit of Engineers on a Behavioral Interview
The 4 dimensions that determine your level of your offer.
14 min read
Saturday 26 September
Why Metacognition Beats Coding Skill in the AI Era | Carol Palombini, Psychologist | TIE
Why leaders, not tools, are what make or break AI adoption.
Thursday 24 September
The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
37signals – the creator of Ruby on Rails (RoR) – moves over to agents generating nearly all its code. Also: Amazon and Meta struggle to hire engineers, code reviews will probably also go away and more
Paid
How to Become a Leader Everyone Wants to Work With
An adapted chapter from my upcoming book “The Multiplier Mindset”, published by O’Reilly.
Paid
Tuesday 22 September
Monday 21 September
Where do AI norms come from?
A dialogue with Dr Cat Hicks on ethics, learning, and what we owe each other. Part one: start by listening.
4 min read
The Most Important Laws You Need to Know for Leading Engineering Teams
How Conway, Brooks, Goodhart, Hofstadter, and other laws help you lead high-performing engineering teams.
15 min read
Sunday 20 September
Trying the Software Factory pattern.
One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has…
Thursday 17 September
Nobody needs a human router
Over the last decade, much has changed in the role of engineering management. Through the 2010s into the peak of Covid in 2021, for many, the role began to optimize for one thing. That one thing was moving information around. Managers translated context upwards from the team and…
17 min read
Tuesday 15 September
The broken windows theory of coding agents
When my most experienced engineer got tired of our shitty code
7 min read
Monday 14 September
Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob
A framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation
11 min read
Thursday 10 September
When individualism worked
There was a moment when individualism was compatible with human identity formation, a golden age when our lifetime and the pace of social change coincided.
2 min read
Tuesday 8 September
Sunday 30 August
Who are we Now?
This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking…
24 min read
Thursday 13 August
Landing the plane
Everyone loves the start of a project. There’s the kickoff, the fresh energy of newness, and the blank canvas of a new feature to build. There’s a particular optimism that comes with beginnings, when the team is aligned, the scope feels manageable, and the possibilities stretch…
11 min read
Tuesday 11 August
Roadmap decisions rather than dates.
One thing that bothered me about Imprint’s product after joining was our lack of passkey support. Passkey support is a rare opportunity to increase resiliency to phishing attacks while simultaneously reducing login friction. If it’s good for our members, our partners, and our…
Saturday 8 August
Middle management roles are also a trap.
Six years ago, I wrote Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. My argument then was that TLM roles present themselves as easier than moving into a full management role, but the tension between doing the software engineering and engineering management aspects of the role made…
Tuesday 14 July
Code Yellow, Code Red
Towards the end of 2025, it seemed that we couldn’t get through a week at Provet without some kind of infrastructure degradation. Outages were piling up, they were hard to diagnose, and customers were losing patience. When a major AWS outage hit in October, our customers didn’t…
12 min read
Saturday 11 July
Generated and suppressed demand.
Eight years ago, I wrote about my theory of restoring struggling teams, which came down to four steps: A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than the week before. Solve by hiring more. A team is treading water if they’re able to get their critical work…
Make no assumptions.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the concept of “soil horizons”, which is the idea that there are many distinct layers of soil, from topsoil all the way down to bedrock, which all combine into a soil horizon. Translating this idea into software, the ideal codebase would…
Wednesday 8 July
Have you heard? Clickhouse is winning the observability wars!
Years ago I predicted that columnar storage would remake observability. What I didn't see coming: vendors would build it, nerf it, and sell a worse version back to you as "Datadog, but cheaper"
7 min read
Thursday 2 July
In defense of AI mandates
When you need to execute a coordinated change on a tight timeline, a mandate is the best and most honest way to fund it.
4 min read
Wednesday 24 June
Is it ethical to use AI?
On externalities and engagement, the problem with purity politics, and why we need to make AI boring again
14 min read
Wednesday 17 June
Friday 12 June
The right kind of AI sceptic
Read about AI opinion online and you get two camps: those who believe it will fundamentally reshape how software gets built, and those who see it as useful tooling but doubt the transformative claims being made around it. Neither side has a monopoly on insight, and both can…
11 min read
Thursday 11 June
Earn your scepticism
Read about AI opinion online and you get two camps: those who believe it will fundamentally reshape how software gets built, and those who see it as useful tooling but doubt the transformative claims being made around it. Neither side has a monopoly on insight, and both can…
11 min read
Saturday 6 June
Verum Factum and the Creator’s Confidence
Verum Factum: we only really know what we made. Dang, I know that feeling with software! And I miss it, now that AI is doing the coding. But sometimes I still get it...
1 min read
Sunday 10 May
What is it like to be you?
This is what I want to know when I get to know someone. What is the experience of being alive in your body, in your world? This is the definition of consciousness: there is something it is like to be you. Erik Hoel contrasts this with LLMs, speculating there is nothing it is…