The Buffalo River, nestled in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas, is one of the best floats in the country. It's so iconic that it's been protected as a National River, the first of its kind. Clear water, tinting to green-blue in the depths. White limestone rocks
There's a problem I see more and more in companies, where Product is thrust into the role of "supervising" Engineering. This is not actually their demesne and will cause friction in the end. Engineering is accountable for development, testing, deployment, and reliability. Product is accountable for
I talk often about how modeling data should be done later in the process. If you start a new project with a models.py or com.mycompany.models.* or models/*.rb then you're putting the cart before the horse, and you're going to model data badly.
In my previous article, Your SaaS's most important trait is Evolvability I talk about the need to define fitness functions that ladder up to core company metrics like NPS, CSAT, GRR, and COGS. Just today I had a great followup where a connection on LinkedIn ask me for
Avoid, avoid, avoid starting a project by modeling your data in an ORM. Why? Because the temptation in data modeling is to model the "thing" perfectly instead of prioritizing your model by utility within your domain. I have seen countless projects die a slow unsatisfying death because their
In the world of commercial SaaS, your technology is always on a trajectory to become generic. Competition catches up. Broader trends change the way software is meant to look, feel, and be used. The longer your product stays static the less it stands out. What this means for your technology
So by now you know I'm a software guy. But what makes me an ecosystem guy? Back in 2020 the pandemic closed down our physical office and made it possible to make my partner's and my long-time dream of living in the mountains a reality. Whether
Communicating technical debt to people other than engineers is essential to getting work on that debt prioritized and valued alongside bugs and product roadmap work, and it’s not easy at all. One key quality distinguishing a good engineering leader from a great one is the ability to bring engineers
I've run the tech side of the M&A playbook now I think 10 times. I want to talk to fellow tech executives who are looking at acquiring a company about tech diligence and what it's for. In 2021 we bought a 30 acre hobby
For me, all of software architecture and in fact product-development organization exists in an ecosystem. The parameters of this ecosystem change over time with respect to your products, related products, and the tech landscape overall. And the great challenge, of a tech organization writ-large is to evolve. I'm
This is the first entry in my series on Production Python. Some of the later entries in this will be paid subscribers only, but I consider showing people how to connect to a database correctly a public service, so here goes. One of the most frustrating things for me over
In my career I’ve been a software engineer, an engineering leader, a product leader, and a senior executive. But I have always come at the problems I solve in all of these roles as an engineer first. There are a lot of different product-development org structures out there, but