Down to earth. Bicycles. Brooklyn.
Fifteen years: junior engineer to VP of Engineering, still shipping code most days. Engineering Leadership, AI, Product, Security. I studied poetry because it's concise and packed with meaning. Then I designed software architectures for the same reasons. Now I make the second by writing the first.
Thoughts
The workshop, not the mandateA mandate gets you installs. A workshop gets you habits.
Twice now I've moved a whole engineering team onto AI coding tools. The thing that worked both times wasn't a policy. It was a room, a couple of hours, and everyone building something small together with the tool open. People who'd been sceptical for months changed their minds in an afternoon, because they saw a colleague they respected get stuck and then get unstuck.
Who runs the post-mortemThe template barely matters. Who runs the meeting does.
At Care/of, when the person who was on call ran it, it became a defence. When a peer who wasn't involved ran it, it became a story about the system. Incidents fell by 90% over two years and I credit the template for maybe a tenth of that.
SOC 2 at fifteen peopleTreat the controls as settings, not a project.
SOC 2 is a yearly tax. You can't avoid it but you can make it small: turn on the thing once, write down where the evidence lives, and let the audit be a day of exporting screenshots rather than a quarter of archaeology. Most of the pain comes from controls someone turned on by hand and forgot.
Why we left ElixirPick the language your next ten hires already know.
We didn't leave because Elixir is bad. It's lovely. We left because every new hire had to learn it, every vendor SDK was a port, and every outage on a small hosting platform was ours to debug alone. Node on AWS is boring, and boring is what you want from the layer nobody should have to think about.
Letting the model read the logsThe clever part was letting something tireless read a table nobody had time to read.
We put event data in BigQuery and asked a model to look for groups of users behaving differently from the rest. It found an audience we'd never marketed to, already using the app in a way we hadn't designed for, converting better than our core. The analysis itself wasn't clever.
Principles, not written yetWhat I currently believe about building software and running engineering teams.
"Currently" is the important word. I expect to be wrong about some of it in a year. Until it's written, here are the twenty questions I'm using to write it, in five parts. If you have an answer for me, I'd like to hear it.
I. Belief
- What do I believe about engineering that most people in my position don't?
- When did I last change my mind about how a team should work? What changed it?
- What would I refuse to do even if the CEO asked?
- Which popular engineering practice do I think is mostly theatre?
II. Speed
- What's the fastest a team I led ever shipped something that mattered? What made that possible?
- What's the slowest? What was in the way?
- What's the difference between a team that is fast and a team that is busy?
III. Process
- I've cut incidents by 90% at two companies. What's the actual mechanism, in one sentence?
- How do I decide when a process is worth its weight?
- What did regulated work, PHI and SOC 2, teach me that applies everywhere?
- How much of technical debt is really a people problem?
IV. People
- What do I do in my first thirty days somewhere new, and why that?
- What does "hands-on" mean when fifteen people report up to you?
- What makes me trust an engineering manager?
- How has AI tooling changed what I expect from a senior engineer? From a junior one?
- What do I owe the people I hire?
V. Looking back
- What did Poets & Writers teach me that NBCUniversal couldn't?
- What's the most useful thing a Head of Product ever said to me?
- What do I wish I'd known the week I started managing?
- If one of these had to go on the office wall, which one?
Projects
- BendFractional CTO. A stretching app that about fifteen million people use.
- 100 Apps in 100 HoursA personal hackathon and a software factory, built with AI, in the open. This site was the first hour.
- Heyyy HealthAn LLM-powered health coach. Designed, built, launched, still maintained.
Work
- BendHead of Engineering, then fractional CTO. Cloud CMS, a new acquisition channel, Elixir to Node, BigQuery.
- ForerunnerVP of Engineering. Climate software for cities and states. 15 people plus Security, SOC 2, on-call.
- Bowery FarmingSenior Director of Engineering. Software that runs vertical farms. 20 people, launches 90% faster.
- Care/ofSenior Director of Engineering. Consumer health, PHI. Incidents down 90%. Diligence for the Bayer acquisition.
- NBCUniversalSenior engineer, principal, then engineering manager. Helped launch Peacock, moved twenty channels to the cloud.
- My Career CopilotOn the side. Careers for teens and veterans, through a thousand day-in-the-life videos.
- AdvomaticSenior Software Engineer. Sites for the ACLU and the American Federation of Teachers.
- Institute for Integrative NutritionSoftware Engineer. Tools for health coaches starting their practices.
- Poets & WritersJunior Web Developer. First job in tech.
- Binghamton UniversityBA in English and Creative Writing.