Engineering, Leadership, and Life

I write about software engineering, leadership, and the judgment built through messy systems, team decisions, mistakes, and curiosity beyond work.

10 min read

Too Liked to Be Useful

I often get surprised when I hear someone say they like a certain manager. I usually have very different reservations about them in my head. The gap between what I think and wha...

10 min read

Vibe Coder vs Software Engineer

More than a decade ago, I wrote about . At the time, I didn’t realize how deeply people had tied their professional identity to Java. My goal was to distinguish between someone...

8 min read

When Code Is Cheap, Does Quality Still Matter?

The other day we were having a casual conversation on quality and looking at a few code examples. If you want serious engineering, you want your code to use a few principles lik...

6 min read

Why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Is a Masterpiece

I don’t know the last time I rated a movie 10 out of 10. I went to IMDb and found out it was in 2014. I’m more selective now when I watch movies, but that doesn’t change how goo...

7 min read

Why We Ignore Advice

The other day, I caught myself giving advice again. I do that a lot. Probably too much. While I was talking, something hit me. I have been told the right thing many times in my...