Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight In Will Larson's book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, he nails why so many executives fail at executing on strategy. However, my experience is that engineering strategies fail for very mundane reasons—the most common of which is that executives assume their strategy will roll itself out. The second most common reason is forgetting to spend time validating the details. Both are...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight It is easy to treat Change Management as a means of controlling the change itself, as if changes were discrete events you could shove into a box on a specific timeline. But change is continuous, it's fluid, and it's much more powerful than any of us can truly control. Systems were changing long before we intervened, and they will continue to change long after we are gone. Surfers...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Platform engineering boils down to consistently delivering positive results on high impact internal projects. Good platform engineering initiatives are measurable and improve the wellbeing of the team (and by extension the organization). To pull this off platform engineers follow a process. Observe and identify real problems Develop a hypothesis Execute on a plan that includes...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight An illusionist is not a sorcerer. While pulling a rabbit from a hat can feel like real magic, it isn't. A thinking person knows that we are being fooled. That is part of the fun. The illusionist knows that we know, even if we can't quite figure out how the trick works. But, no matter how clever the illusion, it will never transcend to "real" magic. No matter how skilled the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Mindfulness is a superpower. Cultivate it. It's easy to get swept up in the frenzy and excitement of new ideas and new technology. While it might feel fun to participate in the short term, it is essential that we make room for quiet contemplation and deep thinking to reflect on what aligns with our long-term values. I recommend taking time each day, first thing in the morning....
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight The feedback loop between intuition and experimentation is a superpower. It is the difference between scanning a room with a very dim floodlight and a laser. Our intuition uses the dim floodlight carefully processed by our peripheral vision. It allows us to take the room in all at once, but we risk turning the dance of shadows into monsters that aren't there. Our experiment is the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Sam Barlien highlighted this stat from the State of Platform Engineering 2025 report: 30% of platform engineering teams don't measure their success at all. Nothing. You might stumble into good outcomes for a while, but without measurement, you can't prove what caused them, defend your budget, advocate for headcount, or show leadership why your work matters. When cuts come (and...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight We, as builders and software engineers, are here to think deeply about new problems that have never been solved before. That's the work. And yet there's world-class FOMO peddling in AI discourse right now. I recently saw a tweet posted to the Book Overflow Discord to the effect of, "If my engineers aren't running ten concurrent agents, I'll fire them," and suddenly many are...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Most things in life are out of our control. This is only exacerbated for those of us who work in complex systems. We can't predict the next outage, re-org, or technology shift. What we can control is our ability to respond to spontaneous changes. In Zen, there is a concept called "mushin", a mind free from distraction, able to respond fluidly to whatever arises. When we cultivate...
2 months ago • 1 min read