Faith, Frameworks, and Finding Purpose 🙏💻✨
In the spirit of the season 🎄—a playful look at how programming languages and frameworks evolve like religions, and why staying open-minded will make you a better engineer.
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📚 Pitfalls & Anti-Patterns: A Glossary for Engineers, Managers, and Product People
A friendly glossary of common traps, anti-patterns, and bad habits that creep into engineering, product, and management work—so you can spot them (and avoid them!) next time they show up.
Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls 🌊
We all agree waterfall is broken.
Somehow, we keep rebuilding it every 90 days and calling it progress.
This is a critique of quarterly planning, control culture, and the illusion that you can schedule flow.
Your Code Isn’t a Masterpiece — It’s Just Design
Some engineers treat their code like art — striving for perfect form, debating aesthetics, and nitpicking endlessly. But code is design, not art. Its value comes from function, not form. Here’s why adopting the right mindset helps your team ship better software — faster.
The Blessing and Curse of Being a Truth-Teller 🤫
Being a truth-teller sounds noble in theory. In practice—at work and in life—it often sucks. Here’s what I’ve learned about the pros and cons of pushing for honesty.
The Traditions We Keep (Even When They Don’t Work Anymore) 🦃
A reflection on workplace traditions: why we keep doing them, when to let them go, and how to tell the difference between helpful rituals and outdated routines — just in time for the holidays.
Make the Backlog Work for You, Not the Other Way Around 🪵
A backlog is not a to-do list, a feature dump, or a trash bin of ideas. It’s a communication tool. If it’s not reflecting user value and team focus, it’s working against you. Here’s how to fix that.
Paging Isn’t a Substitute for Planning
Paging systems are meant to wake people when systems fail — not when communication does. When leaders rely on paging to compensate for coordination gaps, they don’t just disturb sleep; they disrupt trust, ownership, and culture.
Too Close for Comfort: Crossing Boundaries at Work (and Why I’m Done Staying Quiet)
I’ve spent my career navigating inappropriate comments, unwanted contact, and blurred lines—often in silence. This is my story about workplace boundaries, how I’ve handled violations, and why it’s time we stop pretending men can’t be victims too.
You Never Notice the Janitor 🧹
I swore I’d never be a janitor like my dad. But in tech, I became one anyway—cleaning up code, teams, and culture behind the scenes. You only notice the janitor when everything’s broken. And that’s the point.
The Hidden Cost of Overcompensation
Overcompensating—whether with effort, responsibility, or control—often leads to burnout and missed expectations. In trying to avoid failure, we create it elsewhere. Here’s why we need to protect people over products and build systems that don’t rely on heroes.
💥 When Roles Change, So Do Relationships: How I Navigated a Strained Dynamic After Switching from Manager to IC
When I returned to being an IC, a trusted teammate and I clashed for the first time. Here’s what caused the tension, how we worked through it, and what I learned about leadership, trust, and shifting team dynamics.
What My Final Review as a Manager Revealed About Me (and the Company) 🧾
After stepping down from management, I reflected on my final review. It wasn’t surprising — but it was revealing. Here’s what it said, what it missed, and what it taught me about leadership, growth, and the systems we operate in.
Undermined from the Inside: A Cautionary Tale of Organizational Dysfunction
Undermining doesn’t always look like sabotage. Sometimes it’s a private thread. Sometimes it’s a well-meaning idea dropped into a pull request. But when roles get blurred and decisions bypass the people doing the work, dysfunction takes root.