Nobody photographs the scaffolding
My R&D team's work only ever showed up in other people's numbers, so when delivery became the measure, they went. Making that work visible was my job.
Categories
38 pages
Campfire
The people side of the craft: leadership, careers, mentoring, and the story of the blog itself.
The tech debt you can't fix alone
The engineering argument for paying down tech debt almost never won. What got it funded was a promise, and it tended to be my name on the promise.
Fourteen projects, one head
Agents made the doing cheap. What fourteen sessions cost is walking into each one cold, and the one head doing the walking.
Which tests would you cut when the bill arrives?
The runner fleet cost $270 I didn't have, so it went off. The tests stayed on, and the savings came from everything I'd been paying for twice.
What happens when an AI burns out
A Claude session ran for two days, stopped listening and got my hand-written code backwards. So I took it off the job, and asked for a proper handover first.
Management was never a promotion
Management and engineering are two sides of the same coin, and far too many companies forget the engineering side has no cap.
Prove the bug before you fix it
A model handed a bug will hand you back a plausible fix and a green test suite in about a minute. That tells you almost nothing.
The bot couldn't answer it. Neither could I.
I read the question my support bot had fluffed, gave the correct answer off the top of my head, and was wrong. The docs had fooled the person who wrote them.
Check the code you're reading is current
I was a minute from filing a fix for a feature that had shipped the day before. The reason I had not noticed turned out to be a rule of my own, doing precisely what I told it to.
Three places a document can live
A spec, a how-to and a README walk into a repo. Only one of them should still be there in six months.
