Sweating the Bar and Raising the Details
Management meetings were built for an older information system. Poor writing keeps the machinery alive, and one calendar invitation can commit thousands before anybody acts.
Management meetings were built for an older information system. Poor writing keeps the machinery alive, and one calendar invitation can commit thousands before anybody acts.
Cascading a message through management loses reach, meaning and accountability. Policy owners should publish directly, notify proportionately and put repeated rules into the workflow.
AI extends the reach of engineering judgement. Product delivery units can become smaller, management spans can become wider, and collective stewardship can remain.
Better models do not remove the need for expertise. They can make bad judgement harder to recognise and give good judgement far more reach.
AI lets one engineer carry work that might once have required a cross-functional product development team. Delivery units can shrink, management spans can widen, and the community can still own the product.
AI has reduced the cost of coordination across software engineering. Our management structures should probably notice.
A case study in how AI can encourage confidence when the limits of the analysis are not made clear.
Building a premium experience on the web is harder than it looks, but it scales everywhere once you get it right. This is what that discipline actually involves.
Queueing looks harmless at first. A slow call holds a few threads, then a few more, and if left unchecked it can tip the whole system over.
Players only see production. Engineers live in the systems behind it. When those systems fail, the product fails later. The two worlds are closer than they look.
Most slowdowns in an SPA come from one place. Too much work ends up hanging off a single thin thread inside the browser, and the moment it strains, the whole product feels it.
Sparse checkout as the everyday way to work in a monorepo.
Platform Engineering
Finding the Keys That Matter
Developer Experience
Sometimes the fastest way to find out what’s broken is to try to ship it.
Player Experience
Sometimes the things that once made sense deserve another look.
Developer Experience
How many teams ship one product across surfaces without collisions.
Engineering Culture
Why the freedom that makes the web powerful also makes it fragile.
Art & Analogue
A fever dream of early-2000s Britain that still haunts its viewers.
Developer Experience
Why code review must be predictable, humane, and measured.
Organisational Design
When muscles and nerves aren’t enough to stand.
Organisational Design
The practices that make companies faster, safer, and engineers more valuable.
Developer Experience
One wardrobe, many uniforms, one team.
Developer Experience
Why weekly release trains and a monorepo culture deliver stability, speed, and less toil.
Developer Experience
Clarity in the address line is clarity in the organisation.