We Need to Talk About Your Architecture.

This is an intervention. We need to talk. Put the hotdog down. If you need to completely rebuild your architecture to "leverage" AI, you don't know how to build and scale. You're also telling on yourself. Whooops. Every few months, companies seem to love…

Builders Gonna Build

Coming up on my one-year anniversary here at GetOut, I can't help but reflect on my nearly 25 years in software. I've seen engineers without a voice in how they work. Without ownership of how they build. Governed by processes designed by people who don'…

Your Technical Interviews Still Suck

Stepping into hiring, I'm building a strategic hiring plan and I'm reminded that your technical interviews still suck. So time for part 3 of this book. I'm putting Utah engineering leaders on blast. Part 1: Your Technical Interviews Suck Part 2: Engineering Leaders, Stop…

I've been in AI since 1998

I've been in AI since 1998. Back then, we called it T9 predictive text. I learned which numbers produced which letters. I got fast at it. Really fast. Oh, and learning what number combination from pagers meant: "143", "411", and "07734". Beep…

Stop It: Notes From Nearly 20 Years of Engineering Leadership

Stop scheduling "quick syncs" at 4:45pm to see who's still at their desk. Stop measuring productivity by commits or by butts in seats. Stop calling surveillance "collaboration culture." Stop running standups where everyone recites what they already said in Slack. Stop designing process…

The Day 300 Firefighters Watched My Architecture Burn

In 2012, at EVALS, I had a major problem on day one of our launch. "The wheels are falling of the go-cart!!" We were on site at a major fire academy. 300 users on 300 iPads, recording videos, photos, and notes in real time. All of it flowing…

YAML Files Longer Than the Code They Deploy

You don't know what sudo is anymore. You're shipping production three abstraction layers deep thinking the cloud is a place. It's not a place. It's a building in Virginia that smells like burnt dust and has a bizarre buzzing noise that nobody…

AI: Now Your Systems Can Fail at Scale!!! 🎉

If your software infrastructure and architecture needs AI to "produce incredible output," you've already lost. You're clearly coping for not knowing how to build systems that are maintainable, scalable, or reliable. Therefore....... AI. CANT. FIX. YOUR. BAD. FOUNDATIONS. It will just make them fail…

From Prompt Engineer to Crayon Evangelist: A 48-Hour Journey

What if the next hype is eating crayons? LinkedIn Titles/Tags in 48 hours: 🖍️CRAYON-NATIVE ARCHITECT 🖍️CRAYON EATING EVANGELIST 🖍️STRATEGIC CRAYON CONSUMPTION ADVISOR "Most people are eating crayons wrong. Here's my 7-step framework." "Just mass-recruited 400 people who've been eating crayons since 2019.…