I'm a Principal Engineer writing about engineering leadership, systems thinking, and building effective teams. Most of what I write comes directly from the work: patterns I've spotted across companies, failures I've learned from, and frameworks that have actually helped.
Here's where to start, organised by theme.
Engineering Leadership
What it takes to lead engineering teams well, from craft to culture.
- Four Pillars of Engineering Leadership - The foundation - artisanship, strategy, culture, and stakeholder engagement. Each pillar needs the one before it.
- Doing Leveraged Work - Staff and Principal Engineers find work that keeps paying off long after they've moved on.
- Culture Follows Incentives - You don't change culture with posters. You change it by changing what gets rewarded.
- Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners - Different people thrive at different phases. Match people to work, not vice versa.
Systems Thinking & Organisation Design
How team structure and dependencies shape delivery more than individual effort.
- Don't Improve Coordination, Eliminate It - Every sync meeting is a signal - there's a boundary that needs reinforcing.
- Shaping Team Boundaries for Flow - Team Topologies in practice - how structure shapes speed.
- Optimising Teams with Theory of Constraints - One bottleneck controls your entire throughput, not the sum of everyone's effort.
Product Engineering & Delivery
Building the right thing, not just building the thing right.
- Product Engineers - Engineers who care more about whether something works for customers than whether it ships on time.
- Cycle Time is Not a North Star - Delivery metrics are useful, but they're not the goal.
- Less is More - The power of constraints and focus.
Tech Strategy & Architecture
Making technical decisions that compound over time.
- Boring Tech - Innovation tokens are finite. Spend them wisely.
- Reconsidering Tech Debt - Not all tech debt is created equal. Some is strategic.
- Build vs Buy vs Run - The decision isn't just build or buy. Running is the hard part.
AI & LLMs
Practical approaches to working with AI in engineering.
- Scepticism to Collaboration with LLMs - How I went from dismissing AI tools to using them daily.
- Building Lenny's Vault - A side project using AI to make podcasts searchable.