engineering-culture

Bridging Strategy and Execution in the Age of AI Agents

AI changed what's fast. Nobody changed what's slow. Teams are merging twice as many pull requests while review times double and bug rates climb. The bottleneck moved — and most organisations are only now starting to notice.

Every Dependency Is a Decision You Didn't Make

Your lockfile is hundreds of trust relationships nobody negotiated. The highest-profile supply chain attacks of the last decade exploited trust, not code — and no scanner caught any of them in time.

Scaling from 5 to 40 Engineers Without Losing the Plot

The magic of a small team isn't culture — it's proximity. When you scale, you can't preserve it. You have to replace it with something deliberately designed. Most teams import a playbook from a company ten times their size instead.

The Invisible Architecture: How Culture Eats Strategy in Engineering

Incentives, information flow, and the norms that survive scaling — the invisible architecture underneath every engineering system you build.

Human-in-the-Loop: Why Full Automation Is the Wrong Goal

The best AI systems aren't autonomous. They're collaborative. Full automation is a seductive goal that breaks on contact with reality — the winning pattern is bounded autonomy.

First Steps as a Team Lead: Rules I Wish I'd Known

Every leadership book gives you the same ten rules. Most of them are right. All of them are incomplete. What I'd tell myself before stepping into the role.

The Appropriate Level of Complexity

Over-engineering is a well-known sin. Under-engineering is the same sin wearing a different hat. The goal was never simplicity — it was the right complexity, designed to evolve.