Software development and other goofy, geeky goodness.
When I wrote a few months ago that code review is not about catching bugs , the most common pushback I got was a variation of the same thing: “If you’re only getting to that decision at the code review stage, you skipped a step. The basic call about whether to build this should have come much, much earlier – at the design doc stage, before code was written.” I find that argument partly right. The…
My former Parse colleague Charity Majors – now CTO of Honeycomb and one of the strongest voices in the observability space – recently posted something that caught my attention. She’s frustrated with the discourse around AI-generated code shifting the bottleneck to code review, and she argues the real burden is validation – production observability. You don’t know if code works until it’s running…
I’m about to start a new role leading a team I’ve never worked with. After a decade at Google, I’ll be the person who doesn’t know where anything is again. I’m genuinely excited about that. There’s a window when you join a new organization – maybe 90 days, give or take – where being new is actually a superpower. You can ask the questions everyone else stopped asking years ago. You can wander into…
The conventional wisdom about autonomy is simple: remove constraints. Get out of people’s way. Let them figure it out. Trust them to run. But this often backfires in a specific, predictable way. Teams think they have autonomy. What they actually have is ambiguity. Everything Was Fine Until It Wasn’t A talented engineer or team starts work on something important. They get buy-in from their…
I spent my baby bonding leave this summer with my newest kid — which was the point. But between feedings and naps, I also found myself trying to deeply understand coding agents and the new developer landscape. I wanted to see where this was all heading. Building MCP servers was one of the experiments that surfaced something I hadn’t fully appreciated: MCP servers have wildly different audiences…
How every abstraction in software creates walls, and why AI might finally demolish them The learning curve for building software is a lie. It’s not a curve at all—it’s a jagged mountain range with sheer cliffs where the trail suddenly ends. You’re cruising along with your no-code tool, dragging and dropping your way to success. Everything’s great until you need that one custom calculation, that…
After nearly two decades building developer platforms, I’ve learned that the moment you truly succeed is when developers find magic in places you didn’t mean to put it. This is terrifying. It’s also the point. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I watch the next generation of platforms struggling with how much control to maintain. The instinct is always to constrain, to guide, to protect…
A former report reached out recently. It was one of those unexpected messages that stops you mid-scroll, the kind that makes you put your phone down and actually think. They wanted me to know I’d been a good manager. More specifically, they remembered how I’d believed in their technical leadership ability early on—perhaps before they believed in it themselves. I sat with that for a while. Not…
Every successful platform has them. They’re worth billions. Yet we don’t even have a name for them. I’m talking about developers who build tools for OTHER developers on your platform. Not your internal team. Not external app developers. The fourth party that makes platforms explode. I’ve been calling them “4p developers” throughout my career building developer platforms at Microsoft, Parse,…
My last post here was about building a data binding framework for Android. That was March 2013. Android was on KitKat, React hadn’t been open-sourced yet, and I was still convinced that mobile apps needed XAML-style data binding to succeed. Narrator: They didn’t. What Happened? Life, mostly. Looking at my old posts, I can trace the arc: I was evangelizing Parse , building pitch pipe apps for…