Posts tagged "Leadership"

When professional survival instincts that propel your career become pathological in personal life. How over-preparation became armor, then identity, then curse.

You've seen the map. You know where you are. Here's the work that actually prevents the spiral - the requirements, the cost, and why most won't do it.

We're rushing toward AI governance as the solution to AI chaos. I've watched this movie before. Here's the map, here's where you are, and here's what happens next if you don't change course.

AI tools removed the speed limit on learning and creation. Then my body sent the invoice for months of borrowing against a balance that never existed.

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.

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.

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.

The system doesn't just fail architects. It teaches them to fail. Here's how institutional capture turns truth-tellers into artifact producers.

The architect is the accountable party for migration success or failure. Not because leadership doesn't matter, but because translation is our job.

AI as a writing partner, not a ghostwriter. How to use AI to think better, not to avoid thinking entirely.

Why AI doom narratives distract from real risks and real opportunities. A practitioner's perspective on fear, progress, and human nature.

How to maintain credibility with practitioners who know more than you in their domains.

You'll build the instrumentation. Leadership will nod at the dashboard. Then nothing will happen. The same organizational failure that killed SRE adoption.

A framework for building confidence in AI-enabled systems through observable criteria, instrumentation, and staged authority expansion. Theory meets practice.

Real scenarios and frameworks for translating between business needs and technical reality.

Stop asking if you can trust AI. Start building confidence in systems you understand. The trust discourse is sabotaging adoption with the wrong frame.

Addressing real objections to AI adoption: quality concerns, supportability, and what happens when your craft becomes accessible to everyone.

The real job of architects isnt technical depth - its translation between business and technology.

Why AI tools are extensions of you, not replacements. A practitioners guide to AI adoption for the uncertain and skeptical.

How to operationalize platform architecture in your organization - practical guidance for building the function.

Why SRE adoption failed outside Google and what we learned from attempting to transplant a complete system rather than adapting principles to organizational reality.

How to implement resiliency as a design principle woven into platform architecture, with practical guidance for operations teams and AI integration.

Practical steps to implement Platform Resiliency on Monday morning - from drawing clear boundaries to enforcing standards through the platform.

The consequences of strong and weak platforms - why platform decisions compound over time.

Defining platform architecture - the role nobody understands but every organization needs.

The preconditions for good decision-making that most organizations lack - and what to do when you cant build them.

A repeatable framework for evaluating technology decisions that accounts for your people, customers, business, and measurement criteria.

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.

The technical debt collector is calling. What happens when organizations avoid making strategic technology decisions upstream.

Your engineers are drowning in decisions that don't matter. Technology choices should be made upstream, not by every team independently.

For years, I worked scared. Heres how psychological safety transformed my career from fear-driven to freedom-focused.

Leadership lessons from Drum Major Camp that shaped my career - forgiving, giving, and the four pillars that make great leaders.