I love books. Specifically, I love the physical artifact, also known as a codex, for its role in passing on wisdom through the ages—as beautifully described in Ken Liu's short story "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species." I don't read many books a year, as I prefer to practice slow reading and savour each one of them—I'm kidding, I'm just a slow reader. My love for books, combined with my slow reading ability, makes me a perfect practitioner of tsundoku—to reduce my pile, I started gifting my friends the books I want to read instead.

The expectations for Engineering Managers have violently shifted from people-first to code-first—and we risk losing the lessons of the former.

I’ve been thinking a lot about taste and creativity as the next frontier for LLMs. Those who have experimented enough with them know that the content they produce is generally pretty dull—it misses the spark of novelty and creativity. It’s difficult to explain, but one could say it lacks soul. But how could we infuse soul into LLMs? We could probably prompt them to be opinionated in a specific direction, but how can we train them to have taste? The kind of taste that’s difficult to explain in a prompt. The kind of taste that seems irrational, random, and rooted in feelings.

When you have a team of high-performing engineers with intrinsic motivations to grow in their craft, managing performance becomes more straightforward. The difficult conversations flow more naturally. Stretching them doesn’t feel forced. They’ll embrace your feedback and act on it when there is alignment, and alignment is the key here. Career growth conversations are only one aspect of managing high-performance teams, but they are a crucial one, not only for the individual’s career progress but also for team productivity, innovation, and retention. In this post, I’ll focus on a few tips and tactics that worked for me and improved the effectiveness of those conversations.

Layoffs suck. Losing your job in this economy is terrible, and dealing with the aftermath's low morale and high uncertainty is incredibly stressful. If you work in tech and haven't gone through it, consider yourself lucky. In this post, I want to share my perspective as someone who survived recent layoffs, offer some thoughts on preparing mentally for this reality in today's tech industry, and provide practical signs to watch for if you're concerned about your own company's stability. Automattic recently laid off 16% of its staff, mostly engineers. I was lucky not to have been affected by it.

AI tools are slowly but gradually changing the Software Engineering profession. Although some might argue that the gains in productivity are overestimated, I think this is only the beginning. As those tools improve and evolve to become agentic, such as Devin AI, the industry has started to wonder if there will be much demand for Software Engineers, or even if AI could replace engineers altogether. I have colleagues reaching out to me and being worried about their career in a 18-month horizon. I guess Mark Zuckerberg's recent statement…