The Curious Engineer

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Somehow Manage

somehowmanage.com

Osman (Ozzie) Osman Hi! I'm Osman, most people call me Ozzie (or Oz or O). I build products and teams that build products (and occasionally, teams that build teams that build products). TOP POSTSYou get to know people best by seeing how they think, and I think most clearly when I write. Here are som

Engineering management / careersAI / MLEssays / personal

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
44 from 7 Jun 2020 to 26 Jun 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 5

  1. A Simple Manager’s Equation
  2. When AI Does the Work, Who Is Accountable?
  3. The Bottleneck is Not Where You Think
  4. A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: Monarch’s Philosophy on AI in Dev
  5. Monarch’s Engineering Values

2025 2

  1. Plenty Enough
  2. AInxiety — AI is Awesome but It’s Fucking Exhausting

2024 1

  1. Mindless Products vs. Mindful Products

2023 2

  1. Writing an LLM Agent in 50 Lines of Code (or no Code at All)
  2. What Managers Can Learn From the Army’s Antidote to Micromanagement

2022 5

  1. Stepping On the Managerial Brakes
  2. The Simplest Way to Build Trust
  3. How to Prioritize Technical Debt
  4. How to Negotiate an Offer Deadline Extension
  5. Web3: Vegas vs. Promised Land

2021 10

  1. You Don’t Have to Manage, But You Still Have to Lead
  2. Gavage: Don’t Force Feed Your Funnels
  3. The Principle of Least Surprises and Stakeholder Management
  4. Things To Do Before And After You Write Code
  5. Disrespectful Design, Part II
  6. Poetry, Essays, and Code That Lets you Get on with Your Day
  7. How to Creatively Solve Problems as a Non-Creative Person
  8. The Hidden Structural Costs of Incompetence
  9. Why All Engineers Must Understand Management: The View from Both Ladders
  10. Disagree and Commit And Prove Yourself Wrong

2020 19

  1. Product/Culture Duality
  2. Organizational Psychologist vs. Organizational Mechanic
  3. Using Systems Thinking to Understand Personal Finance
  4. A Small Difference in Developer Productivity Can Amplify Over Time
  5. Mission Tactics: When Under-Specifying is Good
  6. Good Architecture: Data Model vs. Data Flow
  7. 4 Hiring Myths Common in HackerNews Discussions
  8. The Shape of Technical Debt
  9. Hire people you believe in—believe in the people you hire
  10. Code is a liability, not an asset
  11. How I Started Writing More
  12. Push vs. Pull-based Urgency
  13. Is Revenue Model More Important than Culture?
  14. Disrespectful Design—Users aren’t stupid or lazy
  15. Data is Not a Substitute For Good Judgment
  16. Write a Design Doc—even if no one else will read it
  17. Our hiring process is what we can get away with
  18. The Software Over-specification Death Spiral
  19. Software as a Liability