/career
Posts touching career.
7 posts
- April 12, 2026 4 min
The portfolio is the proof. Ship your work or it did not happen.
Not resumes. Not endorsements. Not interview performance. The code you ship, the systems you build, the writing you publish. Ship it or it did not happen.
- /career
- /engineering-leadership
- /architecture
- /experience
- April 5, 2026 4 min
What I got wrong in my first year as Head of Engineering and what I would do differently
Over-hiring before culture. Saying yes to everything. Underinvesting in developer experience. Staying hands-on too long. The common thread was not trusting the team.
- /engineering-leadership
- /career
- /decision-making
- /team-building
- /experience
- March 15, 2026 5 min
The real job of a Head of Engineering
Make throughput predictable and quality sustainable. Not hero-shipping. Not writing the most code. Build a system that delivers without depending on any single person.
- /engineering-leadership
- /career
- /decision-making
- /cross-functional
- /blog
- January 26, 2026 4 min
Why I run my portfolio site on the same stack I use at work
Next.js, Payload CMS, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare. Not laziness. Every problem solved on the portfolio feeds back into production expertise.
- /architecture
- /typescript
- /react
- /postgres
- /career
- November 17, 2025 4 min
Fifteen years of writing code and I still mass-delete my first draft
The first draft reveals the problem's shape. The second draft solves it. Engineers who try to write perfect code on the first pass are optimizing for the wrong thing.
- /career
- /engineering-leadership
- /architecture
- /experience
- September 17, 2025 4 min
The one-on-one framework I use after fifteen years of getting one-on-ones wrong
Three fixed sections: blockers with deadlines, career trajectory, and one question the report chooses. Structure creates safety without drift.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /career
- /experience
- June 30, 2025 5 min
Eighteen months in: the five things I would tell myself on day one as Head of Engineering at a startup
Delegate before you are ready. Learn compliance before it learns you. Your cofounder's priorities are not wrong, just different. Tech debt compounds faster than you think. And the hardest one: your job is not to write the best code.
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /career
- /experience