Becoming a tech lead was the goal from pretty early in my career. I had a clear picture of what the role was. More responsibility, more influence over the work, more of the interesting problems landing on my desk because someone had to figure them out and that someone, finally, would be me. It read like the natural next step. The thing you graduate to once you're good enough. What that picture did
I use AI coding agents every day. I believe they are reshaping how we build software, and I think the teams that adopt them deliberately will outperform those that don't. I am not writing this to warn you away from AI-assisted development. I am writing this because the loudest voices in the AI enthusiasm camp are also the most allergic to discussing what can go wrong. And that worries me more than
AI can write code. Good code. Clean code. Fast code. That doesn’t make development trivial. It shifts where the true value lives. When code was slow and expensive, writing it was the work. Decisions developed gradually. Architecture changed over time. Judgment was distributed throughout implementation. When the cost of code drops, that balance flips. The difficult part is no longer creating softwa
On Second Thought — Episode 06 The ORM hides the SQL. The cache hides the ORM. The service mesh hides the services. The operator hides the YAML, which already hid the kubelet, which already hid the container, which already hid the process. By Tuesday, nobody quite remembers what the original problem was. They are too busy configuring its sixth wrapper. This is the post about that wrapper. When som
Every team experiences incidents. The teams that grow stronger from them are the ones that take postmortems seriously — not as blame sessions, but as structured learning opportunities. Yet most postmortems end up as a wall of text nobody reads twice, filed away and forgotten until the same incident happens again six months later. This guide walks you through writing postmortems that genuinely chan