You Can't Train Clear Thinking
Spec quality isn't a skill you can workshop. It's an emergent property of organizational health. Why training fails and what actually produces clarity.
Leadership
Technical Leadership & Mental Health
Technical leadership insights and mental health in tech. Building psychological safety, managing anxiety, and leading with authenticity.
What You'll Find Here
Technical leadership isn't just about technology—it's about people, psychology, and creating environments where teams can do their best work. These posts explore the intersection of technical leadership and mental health, with practical insights for building resilient, high-performing teams.
Topics covered:
- Technical leadership and decision-making
- Mental health and anxiety management
- Psychological safety and blameless culture
- Team dynamics and communication
- Organizational change and transformation
- Personal growth and authenticity
Latest Leadership Posts
Learning Through the Machine: The Hollow Promise of AI Productivity
AI can accelerate your growth or replace it. The productivity discourse gives you metrics that feel good but tell you nothing about what's happening to your capability.
The Two Tells: How to Know If Your Organization Can Govern AI, or Anything
Two early signals reveal whether your governance initiative will succeed or fail. Learn to spot them before wasting eighteen months building something that was never going to work.
Why Architects Stop Translating
The system doesn't just fail architects. It teaches them to fail. Here's how institutional capture turns truth-tellers into artifact producers.
Migrations Fail When Architects Don't Translate
The architect is the accountable party for migration success or failure. Not because leadership doesn't matter, but because translation is our job.
Thinking Through the Machine
AI as a writing partner, not a ghostwriter. How to use AI to think better, not to avoid thinking entirely.
The End of Humanity Won't Be Caused by AI
Why AI doom narratives distract from real risks and real opportunities. A practitioner's perspective on fear, progress, and human nature.
What Architects Actually Do - Part 3: Credibility
How to maintain credibility with practitioners who know more than you in their domains.
Confidence Engineering - Part 3: Adoption Déjà Vu
You'll build the instrumentation. Leadership will nod at the dashboard. Then nothing will happen. The same organizational failure that killed SRE adoption.
Confidence Engineering - Part 2: The Practice
A framework for building confidence in AI-enabled systems through observable criteria, instrumentation, and staged authority expansion. Theory meets practice.
What Architects Actually Do - Part 2: The Framework
Real scenarios and frameworks for translating between business needs and technical reality.
Confidence Engineering - Part 1: Why the Trust Discourse Is Sabotaging Itself
Stop asking if you can trust AI. Start building confidence in systems you understand. The trust discourse is sabotaging adoption with the wrong frame.
The Poetry of Code - Part 2: Addressing the Fear
Addressing real objections to AI adoption: quality concerns, supportability, and what happens when your craft becomes accessible to everyone.
What Architects Actually Do - Part 1: Translation
The real job of architects isnt technical depth - its translation between business and technology.
The Poetry of Code - Part 1: Building Your Digital Self
Why AI tools are extensions of you, not replacements. A practitioners guide to AI adoption for the uncertain and skeptical.
The Platform Layer - Part 3: How Do You Do It
How to operationalize platform architecture in your organization - practical guidance for building the function.
Platform Resiliency - Part 1: The Promise That Couldnt Travel
Why SRE adoption failed outside Google and what we learned from attempting to transplant a complete system rather than adapting principles to organizational reality.
Platform Resiliency - Part 2: The Promise That Can
How to implement resiliency as a design principle woven into platform architecture, with practical guidance for operations teams and AI integration.
Platform Resiliency - Part 3: Promises Made, Promises Kept
Practical steps to implement Platform Resiliency on Monday morning - from drawing clear boundaries to enforcing standards through the platform.
The Platform Layer - Part 2: Why It Matters
The consequences of strong and weak platforms - why platform decisions compound over time.
The Platform Layer - Part 1: What It Is
Defining platform architecture - the role nobody understands but every organization needs.
Decide or Drown - Part 4: Feedback
The preconditions for good decision-making that most organizations lack - and what to do when you cant build them.
Decide or Drown - Part 3: The Four Pillars
A repeatable framework for evaluating technology decisions that accounts for your people, customers, business, and measurement criteria.
Debugging Myself
Five years after writing about surviving anxiety, this is the victory post. How I won the battle for my mind and what it means for leadership.
Decide or Drown - Part 2: Technical Gluttony
The technical debt collector is calling. What happens when organizations avoid making strategic technology decisions upstream.
Decide or Drown - Part 1: The Illusion of Choice
Your engineers are drowning in decisions that don't matter. Technology choices should be made upstream, not by every team independently.
From Fear to Freedom
For years, I worked scared. Heres how psychological safety transformed my career from fear-driven to freedom-focused.
Leadership, Drum Major Style
Leadership lessons from Drum Major Camp that shaped my career - forgiving, giving, and the four pillars that make great leaders.