Engineering leadership in growing companies is defined by the decisions that connect architecture to execution. I write about the systems that enable teams to deliver consistently, the tradeoffs that come with scaling, and how technical choices translate into outcomes based on what I’ve seen work in real environments.
The Antidote to Impostor Syndrome at Startups in the age of AI
Tech has always evolved quickly. New frameworks, new architectural patterns, new flavors of Agile have always shown up faster than anyone could absorb. AI has cranked the pace up to a level that makes the old churn look slow. Coding assistants change every month, the patterns for using them keep shifting, and even what counts…
Keep readingI Built the Platform, Survived the Acquisition, Then Retired My Own System
The day I found out the company I’d helped build was being acquired, my mind went straight to the application. I’d spent six years as the senior technical leader of a healthcare data SaaS company. I’d built our platform from a proof of concept, scaled the engineering team, owned product decisions alongside our CEO, and…
Keep readingThe Player-Coach Has a Shelf Life
I was fixing a production bug late one night during my time at The Ignition Group. The bug was in a scheduled job that processed inbound data files, and I had traced the problem to a specific method in the data access layer. The fix itself was straightforward. What caught me was the git blame.…
Keep readingBuilding a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 3: Scaling into the Cloud and through an Acquisition
By this point, the platform was doing what it was designed to do. The multi-tenant database had replaced a dozen separate client environments. The data access layer and reporting engine were generating several million dollars a year in revenue. The automation tooling had gotten the data team back on schedule. We’d grown from about a…
Keep readingThe Boring Architecture Decisions That Quietly Compound
Every few years software engineers converge on a new paradigm, and suddenly it feels like you’re falling behind if you haven’t adopted it. Microservices. Event-driven architecture. Server-side rendering coming back around. Each of these emerged because real teams hit real scaling problems and needed better solutions. Before adopting any of them, ask whether your team…
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