February 1, 2026
Leadership
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.
January 19, 2026
AI
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.
January 16, 2026
Communication
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.
January 16, 2026
AI
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.
January 15, 2026
AI
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.
January 14, 2026
Leadership
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.
January 11, 2026
DevOps
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.
January 3, 2026
Best Practices
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.
August 9, 2025
Leadership
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.
April 5, 2025
Leadership
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.