Practical ideas to help you build better software faster

So what’s supposed to happen in a campfire? That was how the session opened. With a shrug, a half-shared screen, and a team of engineers who’d never run a campfire before about to run one anyway. There’s a lot of talk right now about software engineering being at a tipping point , about engineering…

The board wants numbers, the newly hired VP read something about needing AI productivity metrics, and the CFO heard that AI tools should be doubling engineering output. So a well-meaning engineering leader (perhaps you) launches a productivity initiative, starts with measurement, and either sees no…

Measuring the productivity impact of AI coding tools used to be a simpler problem. When I first wrote this article at the start of 2025, leaders mostly wanted to know one thing: are these tools worth adopting at all? And we were talking about acceptance rates, usage dashboards, metrics pre- and post…

I’ve been leading software engineering teams for 15+ years, and frankly, the playbook has stayed pretty much the same. Already back then, the good companies knew how to organize around outcomes and customer value, iterate quickly, empower teams, build tooling and automation, and always improve their…

In the late 90s and 2000s, the open source movement — and Linux kernel development in particular — normalized the idea that all code should be read by someone else before it gets merged. Over the past two decades, code reviews became one of those table-stakes things that serious engineering teams…

Gartner just published the first-ever Magic Quadrant™ for Developer Productivity Insight Platforms. Gartner estimates the DPIP market size at approximately $400 million with an average growth rate of over 40%, based on an assessment of global organizational spending on data-driven engineering…

When capital was cheap and talent was scarce, performance management in software engineering was laser-focused on keeping people. “Below expectations” was a rating you used sparingly, and rarely needed. That era is over. Post-ZIRP, with AI compressing what headcount companies think they need, “below…

At some point, a board member is going to ask you something you don’t have a clear answer to. What is the company getting from all the AI investment? Why did a competitor ship that feature first? Deep breath. The answers are usually in your head — you just need to build a reliable way to translate…

“We’re using AI for coding” can mean a lot of things. Autocomplete in your IDE, a chat interface that knows your codebase, or an agent opening pull requests while you’re on the bus. The tools are different — different tradeoffs, different failure modes, different things to measure. But many teams…

Every product team prioritizes work, but few can explain how they do it. Ask a team lead what their team is working on, and you’ll get a clear answer. Ask them how they decided that was more important than the five other things competing for attention, and it’s suddenly not so clear. It felt…

The craftsmen are losing their magic, and the amateurs are finally building. Nobody asked for this, but here we are — and it looks like there’s no going back. ~ Manuel, a software developer from Spain, described his relationship with programming the way some might describe a long relationship. Not…

You’re in a leadership sync, and someone from the C-suite asks a straightforward question: When will the self-service product be ready? All eyes turn to you. Marketing needs a date for the launch, sales has already set expectations with prospects, and now you’re expected to give an answer. So you…