Engineering an Interesting Life
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Performance Reviews Are the Scorecard of Capitalism (And Why That Should Free You)
Every review season is an emotional rollercoaster. Anxiety. Self assessments. Anticipation. Disappointment. As an IC, I felt like how much it impacted me was a personal failure. As a manager, I learned that review season trauma is pervasive. The worst thing about all of it, I think, is how much people take it out on…
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Scaling Teams: People, Projects, and Process
Scaling teams is one of my favourite things to do – probably because it’s where people meet systems, with ever-changing questions about what makes teams effective and how to balance now versus next. Sometimes this gets presented in a pure numbers way, but I like to come at it from a systems perspective: Engineering teams…
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Spring Cleaning in December
I used to have a habit of refreshing my website at the end of each year, but I missed a couple and then it became in my head a bigger project that was a discouraging combination of feeling both pointless and overwhelming. But on a productive tear (with Claude) during the winter break, I finally…
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Q4 2025
I like the idea of doing a quarterly review of my annual theme, as a way to reset, re-evaluate, figure out what I want to change and celebrate what I did actually accomplish. I set my intention for the year as “health”, and in Q4 I returned to myself as a creative being. I read…
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From Chaotic Learning to Intentional Growth
Before the pandemic I was always on the move, and I would have told you always learning. I found myself at various events, talked to many different people, was always reading something, and my job changed frequently, even within the organisation I was in. I also wrote a lot, which helped me consolidate and clarify…
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Book: Life in Three Dimensions
I learned about the book Life in Three Dimensions on the Happiness Lab podcast. I was fascinated by the idea of psychological richness. A psychologically rich life is one with interesting, varied and perspective changing experiences. Oishi argues this is the missing dimension of what it means to live a good life. Distinct from happiness…
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Resisting Capitalism’s Shoulds
I’ve been feeling pretty mad about capitalism lately. One of the core things I’ve been angry about is realizing that capitalism is a huge source of “shoulds” and fake productivity. The goal of capitalism is to keep us running, keep us consuming, and to distract us from what is actually meaningful to us as human…
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Announcing: DRI Your Career
When I wrote part 1 of The Engineering Leader, about what it means to be the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) of your career, it was a product of some hard won lessons of my own, conversations with friends, and an arc I saw repeatedly with my 1:1 coaching clients. Talking with my long time friend…
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Book: The Fax Club Experiment
The Fax Club Experiment is an interesting book. 100 people signed up to receive a weekly prompt, via fax (!) and responded only under their assigned number. 32 people made it to the end, and the book is a selection of their responses. I enjoyed people’s deeper thoughts, separated from any knowledge of their identity.…
