Blogs about Management

Reading with a computer assistant (an LLM) to answer questions, summarize dense paragraphs, and expand on ideas has been one of the ways I leveled up at reading over the back half of the year. …

Six years ago I spent a week training a neural network to write blog posts and the results were terrible. Now with LLMs I want to see how much easier and better the results are.

We are now living in the age of OpenAI narrative, and a lot of problems are to be aligned to fit it. What are going to be side-effects of its implementation is going to be …

I joined Kooth as Chief Technology Officer just over a year ago. Kooth has spent the last two decades building digital mental health services for young people to help provide early and responsive mental health …

Phone signal in the UK has seemingly become worse and worse over the last year. 5G slowing to a crawl and 4G / 3G often not working at all even in larger towns and cities. …

Continuing the tradition from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2024. The life I want to live For the past 6 years, I’ve organized my year in review posts by …

Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases …

Let’s talk about the basic concept of the "making app". I’ve written about this before, and demoed it in some of my public project walk-throughs, but there’s no single straightforward explanation out there, so let’s …

In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice, he develops the concept of Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs. His premise is that you should cheaply test new ideas before fully committing to them. Your organization can only afford …

I wanted to share some notes on how I run remote retrospectives. These are not incident retrospectives, which I tend to run differently. But these are for project retrospectives, or for regular check-ins with a …

My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions that make it more likely for the company to succeed. …

I have a few gripes with most food/calorie/macro trackers: About half the stuff I eat on any given day is stuff I eat EVERY day and I don’t want to enter it manually every day. …

Chapter 5 of The Staff Engineer’s Path is going to be about leading big projects, the kind that involve a lot of teams, or where the stakes are high, or the path forward is ambiguous–or …

As leadership, Q+A serves several important functions. The first, obviously, is to answer questions people have. No matter how well we communicate (and let’s be honest, how well do we really communicate?) there will always …

This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) …

TL; DR: Critique and review are different. Critique is simply about making the work better. Review is about assessing readiness for the next stage in the process. Healthy critique requires psychological safety. To make the …

You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, …

The Asch conformity experiments showed how badly we want to belong, even when we know it is wrong.