Your CTO drowns in Slack. Revenue is stable. Not a crisis—a framework problem.
Strategic, Operational, Tactical work. Most orgs blur them completely. That's why they burn out.

As team lead, head of tech, or VP of Eng: keep asking yourself "are we moving the needle in the right direction?"

The worst trap in engineering leadership isn't too little ambition—it's confusing activity with momentum. Looking busy and being effective feel the same in week one. By week twelve, they're completely different things.

Most teams optimize for the appearance of progress over actual progress. The cost: burnout, debt, and slower real delivery. Sustainable pace isn't lazy. It's how you actually finish the race. #techLeadership #agile

Odysseus is out: a Caddy+Docker+SSH cli tool (in Ruby) to deploy containers on VPS and baremetal hosts:
- zero downtime deploys
- supports managing DBs and other side containers
- automatic certificates
- secrets in encrypted file

insights.wa-systems.eu/a-journey-od... #OpenSource #docker #caddy

I needed to deploy containerized apps, on a few servers, relying on SSH, Docker and Caddy principally (standard stuff).

Writing something from scratch isn't fast, but nowadays ... who is really writing stuff from scratch ?

Part 2 is live: "Mini-teams of 2: Where Leadership Emerges"
If you're a CTO/founder at 5-15 people and feeling overwhelmed, this one's for you.
The problem: task dispatch stops working around 8 people. The solution is pairing. But pairing has a hidden cost.

Launching WA Systems Insights - stories about scaling engineering teams at 5-50 people.

First piece explores contractor swarms: why they work at small scale, why they break around 10-12 people, and what naturally emerges instead.

Another Supply chain attack on npm, with 20 or so packages impacted. Here is a pair of scripts to check the exposure of a project: gist.github.com/mcansky/5d50...

Fostering a technical culture takes time, effort, and patience.

A small story: I migrated another infra setup to an IaaS. We needed a way to trigger deploys in a way that fit our team’s workflow.

Most broken teams aren’t suffering from a skills gap.
They’re stuck in a bad culture design.

You don’t need to be a dictator to build a high-performance team.
In fact, the best leaders rarely raise their voice.

Flashy doesn't last.

Loud gets attention—but only until something louder shows up.

Quiet, focused professionals play a different game: signal over noise.

"Move fast, break things" is, by now, an old startup trope.

There’s a reason it works—in early-stage startups. It’s a survival mechanism. The cost of breaking things is often lower than the cost of stagnation. You pivot, you ship messy solutions, but you buy yourself another shot at success.

alpinelinux.org/posts/Seekin...

Packet.net was a nice product, with Equinix sunsetting its remains Alpine Linux is looking for sponsors to replace it.

Old trick: find young, talented but impressionable people, make them feel special. They will do whatever you want.

It's used by abusers in all kinds of settings.
As a parent: teach your kids about this pattern.
As a leader in an organization: mentor young talent about it.

pglogical, a great little piece of software to migrate to a new postgresql instance with minimum downtime.
What's the overview of the process though? A thread #postgresql

a threaded reflection ... on Charlatans and bullies

Running after yet another shinny thing instead of doing what's actually needed? Yep, a classic red flag of project and product management ... and behavior: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiny_o...