Practical ideas to help you build better software faster

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

Most advice about engineering metrics treats them like a shopping list: pick DORA, add some SPACE dimensions, throw in some cycle time, done. But this approach ignores an important question…

DORA metrics have evolved since they were first introduced in 2014, but they remain the gold standard for measuring software delivery performance. This guide, first published in 2022 and…

Right now, the gap between AI coding tool hype and reality is wide enough to drive a truck through, and LinkedIn would have you believe these tools are already navigating complex legacy…

When looking at a product like Swarmia, it can be hard to see how to put the theory into practice. In this post, I’ll share how we use Swarmia across our engineering organization to work…

In April, during a company offsite, Hugo pitched an idea that would improve how Swarmia links work across tools. Knowing whether a pull request is related to a particular issue can be tricky…

If you’ve sat through estimation meetings, debated whether a task is a 3 or a 5, and then watched those numbers get used in ways that felt counterproductive, you’re not alone. Story points…