On Starting Fresh: A Developer's First Post
Why I'm writing here, what I plan to explore, and the belief that the best technical leaders never stop being builders.
I've spent the better part of my career leading engineering teams — hiring, mentoring, setting technical direction, sitting in board meetings, and writing far more strategy documents than code. It was meaningful work. But I never stopped thinking of myself as a builder first.
This site is an experiment in returning to that.
Why now?
After years as a CTO, I've accumulated opinions. About how to structure engineering organizations. About the tradeoffs in distributed systems. About why most technical debt isn't actually a debt problem. About what makes a great engineering culture and what kills one.
I've shared these views in 1:1s, team offsites, and investor meetings. Now I want to write them down — partly to sharpen them, partly to make them useful to someone beyond the room.
What you'll find here
I'll write about engineering leadership: how to hire, how to communicate technical risk to non-technical stakeholders, how to build a team that ships consistently without burning out.
I'll also write about craft. I still code. I believe technical leaders who don't build lose their instincts for what's hard and what isn't. This site itself is built in Next.js with a markdown-based content layer, deployed on Vercel. I built it over a weekend.
The real reason
Honestly? I missed having a place to think out loud. Decades in executive roles can make you more careful — more measured — in what you say publicly. But measured has a cost. The best conversations I've had in my career happened when someone was willing to take a position.
I'm going to try to take positions here.
Pull up a chair.