Writing

All writing

• Visibility is an engineering problem too

  Aug 17, 2026

  Why I became more interested in making good work visible, and how that eventually influenced the tools and team structures I built.

• We wanted to make recognition fair. It wasn't that simple.

  Aug 16, 2026

  What I learned while trying to build a recognition system that didn't just reward the most visible work.

• QA shouldn't be the last line of defense

  Aug 15, 2026

  What I learned when tight sprint timelines turned every release into a fight between development, QA, and product.

• When the org chart gets in the way of shipping

  Aug 14, 2026

  A production-critical project needed to ship in a week. The team that could deliver it didn't belong to one team.

• Sometimes the manager has to take the hit

  Aug 13, 2026

  Performance ratings are rarely popular. I learned that leadership sometimes means owning an uncomfortable decision.

• What happens when implementation gets cheap?

  Aug 12, 2026

  If writing software becomes dramatically cheaper, what becomes more valuable?

• AI can produce code. It doesn't own the engineering decision.

  Aug 10, 2026

  AI-assisted development makes implementation cheaper. That changes where engineering judgment matters.

• How I made a growing interview panel more consistent

  Aug 9, 2026

  When more engineers start interviewing, consistency becomes a different problem from hiring capacity.

• Build leaders, not dependencies

  Aug 8, 2026

  The best sign that you're leading well may be that fewer things need to come through you.

• Technical debt isn't automatically bad

  Aug 6, 2026

  Technical debt gets talked about as something engineering teams should eliminate. Sometimes taking it on is exactly the right decision.

• Sometimes the best architecture decision is a hiring decision

  Aug 5, 2026

  The Angular-to-React decision wasn't really about which framework was better.

• Scaling an engineering team isn't about hiring more engineers

  Aug 4, 2026

  Growing an engineering organization from around 20 to 65+ taught me that headcount is only one part of scaling.

• Visibility isn't the same as more meetings

  Aug 2, 2026

  Managing multiple products taught me that teams need visibility as they grow, but visibility can quickly turn into ceremony.

• Remote work didn't break communication. It revealed where it was already broken.

  Jul 31, 2026

  What managing and hiring remotely during COVID taught me about context, ownership, and communication.

• 0→1 needs a different operating system

  Jul 29, 2026

  What worked when we were trying to prove a product didn't always work once there was a product, a team, and customers depending on it.

• The feature request was impossible. The outcome wasn't.

  Jul 28, 2026

  A customer needed a large CSV export immediately. We couldn't build everything in time, so we changed the shape of the solution.

• The accessibility claims I almost shipped before they were true

  Jul 27, 2026

  Building an accessibility-first library taught me that the docs describing your accessibility claims are just as load-bearing as the code, and just as easy to get quietly wrong.

• Making colorblind-safe the default, not the option

  Jul 26, 2026

  Why I couldn't just 'pick nice colors' for a heatmap library, and what it actually took to make CVD-safe, perceptually uniform palettes the only choice instead of a checkbox.

• No database, on purpose

  Jul 20, 2026

  Why Ladderline stores promotion evidence in plain markdown files instead of a database, and the one place that decision still costs something.

• Getting Tracewood out of the monorepo without losing its history

  Jul 18, 2026

  How I pulled one app out of a shared repo, kept its real commit history intact, and the specific way the Vercel redeploy button lied to me about it.

• Two permissions sitting in a manifest that nothing in the code used

  Jul 10, 2026

  A routine store rejection on an unrelated extension turned into a habit of reading permission manifests skeptically — which is how a broad host permission and a scripting permission with no code behind them got found.

• Where does an API token live when your client is a public zip file?

  Jul 6, 2026

  Why anonymized usage counters for a browser extension get proxied through a serverless endpoint instead of calling the analytics backend directly.

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