The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Engineering management / careers

Elided Branches

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Technology, startups, programming, technical management and software architecture

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practice

’15’20’25
Posts
112 from 5 Nov 2011 to 31 May 2026
Posting
now and then (2 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 1

  1. Guidelines for Respectful Use of AI

2025 3

  1. Revisiting Manager READMEs
  2. Dude, Where's My Strategy?
  3. 10 Years of Engineering Ladders

2023 1

  1. The Next Larger Context

2022 2

  1. The Product Culture Shift
  2. Structural Lessons in Engineering Management

2021 4

  1. How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors
  2. An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
  3. Management Basics: Determining a Performance Rating
  4. Make Boring Plans

2020 3

  1. Driving Cultural Change Through Software Choices
  2. The Management Flywheel
  3. Product for Internal Platforms

2019 1

  1. OPP (Other People's Problems)

2018 6

  1. I hate manager READMEs
  2. When is someone ready to manage managers?
  3. Engineering Productivity
  4. Delegation: When being helpful is actually hurting
  5. Are you out of alignment?
  6. Stop answering your own questions

2017 3

  1. How do managers* get stuck?
  2. How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer
  3. Hey Diddle Diddle, Data to Fiddle

2016 14

  1. Building and Motivating Engineering Teams
  2. Microservices: Real Architectural Patterns
  3. The Virtue of Hubris and The Value of Complaining
  4. The Virtues of Laziness and Impatience
  5. Thoughts on Take Home Interviews
  6. Ask the CTO: Getting Information without interruptions
  7. Ask the CTO: Navigating the hands-on to hands-off transition
  8. You can bring a horse to water...
  9. Ask the CTO: The Angry Employee
  10. In Defense of the Repetitive Business Book
  11. Framing
  12. What do I do with my time?
  13. Qualitative or Quantitative but always Analytical
  14. Hiring Engineering Managers: Screening for Potential

2015 16

  1. What is a Technology Company, Really?
  2. Reorgs Happen
  3. The Manager as Debugger
  4. Truth and Consequences of the Technical Track
  5. Open Source Culture
  6. Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose... What's Missing?
  7. Notes on Startup Engineering Management for Young Bloods
  8. Have a Theory
  9. Ask the CTO: Going Rogue
  10. Vision and Trust: External and Internal Leadership
  11. The Trials and Temptations of the New Leader: "Cool Factor"
  12. Entrepreneurial Gap
  13. Get Curious
  14. On the role of CTO
  15. A Letter to My Team for Review Season
  16. Meaningful 2014: Everybody Hurts (notes on SparkCamp)

2014 10

  1. The Best Decision I Made in 2014
  2. "Meritocracy" and the Tyranny of Structurelessness
  3. When Defining Reality, Don't Forget To Deliver Hope
  4. On Charm, Skills and Management
  5. Accountability and authoritarians
  6. Revisiting ideas: Promotion from Within
  7. Please stop threatening me with Moore's Law
  8. Getting From Here to There
  9. SOA and team structure
  10. 2013: The Constant Introspection of Management

2013 3

  1. Replatforming? The Proof is in the Hackday
  2. ZooKeeper and the Distributed Operating System
  3. Branching Is Easy. So? Git-flow Is Not Agile.

2012 36

  1. Make it Easy
  2. Building a Global, Highly Available Service Discovery Infrastructure with ZooKeeper
  3. On Fit and Emotional Problem Solving
  4. Get Better Faster
  5. Becoming the Boss
  6. The Science of Development
  7. Being Right
  8. Growing New Leaders: A Modest Proposal
  9. The Siren Songs of Hack Day Projects
  10. On Yaks and Hacks
  11. Moneyball
  12. Code Reviews, Code Stories
  13. There Is No Number
  14. Corporate culture: A lesson in unintended consequences
  15. War Stories: Guava, Ehcache, Garbage Collection
  16. Hammers and Nails: Managing Complexity
  17. Process Debt and Team Scalability
  18. Budgeting for Error
  19. Intuition, Effort, and Debugging Distributed Systems
  20. Scaling in the Small
  21. Scaling: It's Not What It Used To Be
  22. Debug Your Career: Ask for Advice
  23. Parallelism and the Limits of Languages
  24. Yes, and...
  25. Java console monitoring basics: The "j" series
  26. One Feature in One Month or Ten in Six?
  27. Why I'm Moving Away from the Play Framework
  28. Three Reasons You Should Be Training Your Successor
  29. Networking woes in Java
  30. The value of physical objects
  31. Quick Wins: Monitoring Request Times in Play with Coda Metrics
  32. Developer Joy, Part 2
  33. Developer Joy
  34. Keep it Simple, Dingus
  35. Framework Developers, Application Developers
  36. (E)Git Pain, Git Joy

2011 9

  1. 2011: My Year of Open Source
  2. A quick one: Testing log messages
  3. Effective performance testing
  4. Valuing time, and teamwork
  5. Do the Right Thing
  6. Interviewing for Judgement
  7. A new computer
  8. NoSQL and the Enterprise Developer
  9. ZooKeeper 3.4: Lessons Learned