Career

After more than a decade in the field as an engineering leader and hands-on practitioner, I’m thrilled to be offering a consulting service. I am a strong contributor in three areas: technical consulting, mentorship, and workshops & teaching. Technical Consulting I love digging into tough problems in greenfield and legacy code. A few things I’m good at: Raising code quality (tooling, testing, monitoring & observability, building CI/CD pipelines) Big scary bugs Process improvement Internal/external communication and meeting/ceremony refinement Refactoring Complex feature building Requirements gathering and story-carding Pair programming, code reviews, and hands-on coaching Technical writing and documentation modernization Mentorship I have mentored dozens of software engineers. I love listening and helping people get better! My mentees are successful software engineers across the industry. I can meet on your schedule and cadence. ...

If I had to start over as a person who wanted to become a professional programmer, in 2026, what would I do? ...

Eight years ago I wrote a post called You Should Blog. In it, I made an argument that I still believe in: public, professional writing is something every engineer should try. Today, I want to share why I write, and have for over a decade. ...

Here’s my annual review covering 2024. ...

This post is about how to write software well. It was inspired by this post with a similar title. Read it and write yours. ...

I was the third engineer hired by my company, not counting our technical co-founder. I like that position, and it seems to play to my strengths. ...

Our industry has a concept of “10x engineers”, individual contributors who have the impact of ten colleagues. How can you become one? I’ll try to answer that in this post. ...

I recently hit a decade of professional programming. I’d like to take a moment here and reflect on what I’ve learned. ...

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2023. ...

Something I’ve learned as an engineer: when presented with the option of working on a big project, or doing anything else, take the big project. ...