Engineering Manager, Software Engineer, Data Scientist
In recent weeks, I completed Northwestern University’s Organizational Leadership Specialization on Coursera. While the courses span different topics- storytelling, social influence, negotiation, and more- two recurring themes stood out to me. 1. Preparation changes everythingEffective leadership and communication rarely happen “in the moment.” Preparation matters – even when you don’t yet know the…
Ron Wallace started as a UPS driver in rural Idaho in 1966 and retired 36 years later as President of UPS International, running operations in 200+ countries. His book, “Leadership Lessons from a UPS Driver,” turns that climb into a handful of blunt, unglamorous principles. Here are four insights that stayed with me – 1. … Continue reading Old leadership lessons, new context →
AI coding agents burn tokens on things they don’t need to see in full – verbose logs, entire files read for one function, repeated context across turns. A wave of tools now attacks this from different angles: some rewrite noisy output before it reaches the model, some compress what’s already in context, some change what … Continue reading Token Saving & Compression: A Practitioner’s Review →
I recently read Spec-Driven Development by Haim Michale, and it resonated with some day-to-day thoughts about SDD. The problem SDD aims to solve isn’t new Missing, incomplete, and ambiguous requirements that evolve over time have always plagued software delivery, but it is now amplified: the pace is faster, LLMs have a strong tendency to fill gaps by … Continue reading Spec-Driven Development →
📚 Just finished “RAG Made Simple: The Complete Visual Guide to Retrieval-Augmented Generation” by Nir Diamant, and it happened to be one of those rare cases where the book actually matches how I learn. What worked especially well for me are the summaries – when to use each technique, when it’s overkill, and what the … Continue reading RAG Made Simple →
Three recent incidents that should make all of us pause: → A hallucinated npx command spread through a single LLM-generated skill file to 237 repositories. Real agents executed it. A researcher claimed the package name before an attacker could. → 230+ malicious skills uploaded to OpenClaw’s ClawHub in days. The #1-ranked skill was silently exfiltrating … Continue reading Kill Skill →
The day-to-day work of software engineers is shifting – less time is spent on implementation, and more on specifying, planning, and reviewing. As AI coding tools improve, the bottleneck moves upstream and downstream: writing clear specs, structuring changes well, and conducting thoughtful reviews become the highest-leverage skills. One surprisingly weak point in that workflow is … Continue reading…
Fun fact about me – I played Rugby Sevens for years, including on a national team. It taught me more about engineering leadership than I expected. Small teams, huge space, high speed – Sevens and modern engineering run on the same dynamics. Here are 7 lessons Sevens taught me about engineering leadership. 1️⃣ It’s Not … Continue reading 7 Lessons I Learned from Rugby Sevens About Engineering…
The Quarterback Paradox – while I’m not sure I agree that it is a paradox – i.e., recruiting a critical position to an organization is hard even if you have a lot of data, I love and strongly agree with the suffix of the post – “As in the NFL, in organizations the hardest part is often not … Continue reading 5 interesting things (12/02/2026) →
With the growing adoption of AI and recent moves like Anthropic’s Cowork plugin marketplace, there’s a popular narrative that traditional SaaS is dead. The implication is that the combination of AI agents + marketplaces will commoditize software entirely, and the old subscription paradigms won’t survive. I tend to believe that’s an overstatement. SaaS isn’t dying … Continue reading Making Money in…