The feedback you're not giving is the problem you keep having

You're frustrated with someone on your team. They're not meeting your expectations, they're not "getting it," and you can feel resentment building every time they miss the mark. You've been giving them direction, assigning tasks, course-correcting their work - and yet nothing changes. Before you conclude that this person isn't capable, it's worth asking a harder question: have you actually told them what the problem is?

Stop copying, start thinking

Most founders and engineering leaders I meet share a dirty secret: their playbook is someone else's. They benchmark on competitors, cargo-cult processes from previous employers, and import org structures wholesale from companies operating at completely different scales and stages. It feels safe. It feels informed. But as Apple's CFO Kevan Parekh once said, when you benchmark on others, you risk getting get bad ideas. When you look inward at the details of your own business and team and solve from first principles, you build something worth having.

Your developer productivity metrics are measuring you, not your team

For years, engineering managers could hide behind the inherent complexity of software development. "This work is hard to estimate." "Coding takes time." "You can't rush quality." These weren't lies exactly, but they were convenient shields against accountability.

How the instinct to explain may be your undoing

There's an old political adage that says "if you're explaining, you're losing." It's usually applied to campaign messaging, but there's a version of this that plays out constantly in boardrooms and executive meetings. When a senior leader immediately shifts into teaching mode to justify a decision, they often invite more scrutiny than they deflect.

Professional developers don't vibe, they control

The phrase "vibe coding" has entered the lexicon to describe a workflow where developers prompt an AI, accept the output, and hope for the best. It sounds efficient. It feels modern. And for production systems, it's genuinely dangerous. The distinction between developers who vibe and those who control their AI tools is quickly becoming the most important skill gap in our industry.        

Pull requests are dead, long live pull requests

The code review, that sacred ritual of software engineering, is dying. Not because we've abandoned quality or stopped caring about our craft, but because the ground beneath it has fundamentally shifted. In the age of agentic AI, the pull request as we know it has become a bottleneck masquerading as a best practice.

In-person by default: Relearning how to build effective teams post covid

Remote work solved for productivity in isolation. What it couldn't fully replicate was the ambient awareness that comes from proximity - overhearing a conversation that changes your approach, the quick whiteboard session that untangles a problem in minutes rather than days of async back-and-forth, or the organic mentorship that happens when junior engineers can observe how senior colleagues navigate ambiguity.

You don't have a DevOps team if nobody's on call

If your engineers build systems but never get woken up when those systems fail, you don't have DevOps. You have developers who throw code over a wall to someone else. The "Ops" in DevOps isn't a label - it's a commitment to owning what you build, all the way through to 3am when it breaks.

Mechanisms over process: Building systems that make success the default

Process is comfortable. It gives us checklists, meetings, and the satisfying feeling that we're being rigorous. But here's the uncomfortable truth: most process exists to make us feel like we're solving problems, not to actually solve them. The real leverage comes from mechanisms, systems designed so thoroughly that the right outcomes happen by default, not by heroic effort or perfect compliance.

The pitfall of commiseration

It's a common scenario: a team member expresses frustration to their manager about a company policy, a client issue, or an internal process. The manager, wanting to build rapport, nods along and perhaps adds a complaint of their own. The intention is often to connect, but this act of commiseration is a counterproductive habit for leaders. It trades a moment of superficial agreement for a long-term negative impact on team culture and effectiveness.

Balancing the budget: Why 'tech debt' should be banned

In tech companies across Australia, 'tech debt' is thrown around as a catch-all excuse for prioritising certain engineering work. But this concept is often misunderstood and can be harmful to technical roadmap planning.

Narratives, not bullet points: Why AI writing sucks

There's a distinct pattern I've noticed whenever someone asks an AI to generate copy: the immediate retreat to bullet points. It's as if these systems have an inbuilt aversion to crafting genuine narratives, instead preferring to spew disconnected fragments of thought onto the page.

The magic of being propositional

Ever found yourself in a meeting where your brilliant idea fell flat, not because it wasn't good, but because of how you presented it? I have, more times than I care to admit. Ever wondered why some people’s ideas tend to be accepted more than yours? If might simply come down to how you start your pitch.

Hard things are hard. That's what makes persevering worth it.

There's a concept in outdoor adventure circles called "Type 2 Fun." Unlike Type 1 Fun (immediately enjoyable activities), Type 2 Fun is often not fun at all while you're doing it but becomes enjoyable in retrospect.

I discovered this firsthand during my first half-marathon. Mile 10 was pure agony—legs burning, lungs screaming, mind begging me to stop. Nothing about that moment felt "fun." Yet crossing the finish line delivered a satisfaction that immediate pleasures rarely provide. Looking back, that gruelling experience transformed into one of my proudest memories.

This paradox perfectly describes the reality of engineering leadership in startups.