Being in the right place
Three weeks ago I spent ten days in San Francisco. I went to run our CTO Circle gathering, but I also got to spend time with Exponential, thanks to Guli, and with SOTI, thanks…
Opinionated notes on software, leadership, and business.
Essays on developer productivity, AI, technical leadership, and the economics of building software — including my Short opinionated trend column from CTO Circle.
How do you keep improving as a technical leader?
At our last CTO Circle gathering in Barcelona, the most voted question during the open discussion came from an engineering leader at Spotify: “How do you keep improving as a…
The AI bill is coming
One of the best conversations from our last CTO Circle gathering in Madrid was about what happens when AI stops being subsidized. For the last few years, a lot of AI adoption…
Member of Technical Staff
Some time ago, a tweet went viral in tech circles. Several CTOs and senior technical leaders were joining Anthropic as Members of Technical Staff: not necessarily ICs in the…
The cost of being the innovators
Last week I wrote about creating your own playbook for AI engineering. Teams should look at what others are doing, experiment internally, and build their own way of working.…
Creating your own playbook for AI engineering
In software, we are used to hearing the term best practices. Writing tests is a best practice. Version control, CI/CD, code reviews... they are industry standards that save us…
Deep work vs multitasking for developers
Five years ago, most of my work was single-threaded. As a CS student and developer, it was mostly one task, one problem, long blocks of focus. Then I started pullpo.io, and that…
Hiring devs in the AI era
A few weeks ago, we hosted a CTO event in Barcelona, and one of the topics that came up was hiring. A few months before that, Ilya, CTO at Factorial, also gave a talk in the…
On Harness Engineering
Over the last few weeks, I've been hearing one term everywhere: Harness Engineering. The term seems to have first been used publicly by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of…
On AI killing junior devs and pair programming
Last week we ran a networking event with 60 engineering leaders. Two things stuck with me. First, a phrase I heard more than once: juniors are burning out the seniors. Huge PRs…
Is AI killing Open Source?
At least it's messing with it from multiple angles at once. Flood of "slop PRs." It now costs almost nothing to generate code, but reviewing it still takes human time and…
Product Engineers
Product engineers are not new. We are just noticing them more now. People like Gergely Orosz and Marty Cagan have been talking about this for years. The difference is that AI is…
Do you need to agentify your product?
The way users interact with software is changing. For readers of this newsletter, probably earlier than for most. But in some use cases, this shift is already starting to reach…
The effects of code no longer being a moat
Building software is cheaper. That's not really up for debate. The real debate is what that means for SaaS, open source, and software companies in general. I think the best…
PRs in Trunk Based Development.
Wait, PRs in Trunk Based Development? Yes, PRs in Trunk Based Development
I analyzed code review best practices for a year. This is what I learned.
I've analyzed and interviewed dozens of teams of varying sizes, industries, and countries to truly understand the best practices surrounding code reviews. This is what I learned.
The TRUCE framework for software quality.
In this article, I break down the report: How Developers and Managers Define and Trade Productivity for Quality
2023 DORA Report, broken down.
In this article, I break down the key findings of the recent 2023 DORA Report.