Sharing lessons learned from my Engineering Leadership experiences.
To what extent AI is OK to use in software development might be debated, but in general, the idea is not a controversial one anymore. The debate rather moved on from code completion and simple PR summarizations to Agentic Engineering, where an execution loop allows an AI Agent to function
(Belated) Happy New Year! I gave up naming these updates with the week numbers when the issues became more sporadic and decided to switch to simply numbering them. 72 already! Back when I started this newsletter, the regularity gave me some structure that, back then, I missed from my professional
Turns out regular newsletter publishing isn't my forte... anyway. In late November, I checked out an AI meetup with three interesting talks. Some of them didn't have time or ambitions to go deep into details, and there was one who didn't even promise that,
Is good Engineering Management a fad? A passing symptom, an unintended, and quickly abandoned consequence of a time when funds were abundant and developers so scarce that companies were doing everything to attract them? Will Larson's recent article was circulated in a small leadership community I'm
All kinds of commitments are coinciding nowadays, stress-testing my calendar, to-do, and focus systems – and there are cracks showing. Previously blocked timeslots passed without any progress, lingering task items from previous days copy-pasted to today, and I stopped having Pomodoro sessions a few weeks ago. It&
We're working hard behind the scenes with Jeremy to prepare for the third season of our engineering leadership podcast, The Retrospective . I don't want to jinx it, but at this point, it seems safe to say we'll start releasing episodes soon, so I want
I'm trying to get back to a regular cadence of updates, and will try fortnightly next. (Are you also the person who actively avoids "biweekly" and uses "twice a week" and "fortnightly" instead, because, however ridiculously obvious it would be from the
📋 What I learned recently A few weeks ago, I ditched Notion and started to use  Obsidian . It's not about privacy in my case; I'm just slightly paranoid about losing access to my documents due to any mistake made by a service provider, myself,
This is probably the last update for a few weeks, as we’re preparing for our vacations. Taking big breaks is important to recharge, but I found that smaller pauses, making adjustments in the daily routine, to allow space for relaxing a bit, are important too. I mean things
This week on Leadtime.tech I addressed another reader submission — how to decide the necessary resources to operate a third-party platform. I usually write about the people management aspect of an EM’s life, so it was a fun detour to think about something closer to technical
Summer is coming in full speed to Hungary. I’ll launch this short edition, then head out to meet a friend to share some beers on a terrace. This week on LeadTime.tech I wrote about a difficult challenge: how to approach having to lay off a well-performing
Coincidentally, this week, the power of in-person discussions came up in multiple talks. Written communication, while having the benefits like speed and asynchronicity, misses a bunch of nuances that can be critical during conflicts. A voice call is better; you get a lot of hidden meaning from the tone,
This week in my Engineering Manager Challenges newsletter, I wrote my approach to building a platform team . It’s the twentieth week I’ve been publishing on Substack, and so far, I’m okay with the results: 127 subscribers with a roughly 50% open rate. I’
I’m sitting in the Hungarian Railway Museum’s amazing park, under the shadow of buckeye trees, in the middle of a chirping concert from at least a dozen different birds. Halftime of the 2-day Craft Conference , I arrived a bit early to be able to finish
(Feel free to scroll through the first part if you get annoyed by Bitcoin - I find it a fascinating invention, a celebration of mathematics, so I’m a bit biased.) Bitcoin broke its all-time high this week , climbing briefly above $111K, meaning its hypothetical market capitalization went just