Engineering, Leadership, and Life

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

6 min read

The Years We Can't Hire Back

When I was studying in college, many people switched to computer science from other departments. Nowadays, people ask me if they should get a CS degree. They are surprised by my...

7 min read

The Cost of Looking Competent

Sophia has been with the company for over a decade. In that time, she grew in her role and established herself as one of the goto people, eventually earning her staff title. In...

6 min read

The Double-Counted Future

In 1997, Jeff Bezos sent a letter to shareholders about Day 1\. Despite the rapid growth he was seeing, he wanted to keep the startup mentality. He wanted to give ownership alon...

5 min read

Nobody is Thinking Anymore

Everyone works in AI circles. There's a specification at least halfwritten by AI. There's a piece of code 80% written by AI. There's a strategy document 60% written by AI. If ev...

6 min read

The Void Job

More than a decade ago, I was working on a job scheduler similar to Airflow. We called it Woodsy internally. At first, it was quite simply an application that only uploaded CSV...