The honest engineer

Notes on engineering culture: the gap between how software work is supposed to go and how it actually goes, and what an honest look at that gap teaches you.

A running series about the uncomfortable, unglamorous truths of building software on a team: the features nobody uses, the optimism that papers over real problems, and the rituals we mistake for accountability. Less about code, more about how we actually work.

  1. The week the AI went down

    A thought experiment: every AI coding assistant goes offline for seven days. How much of what I call my skill is actually mine?

  2. Whose name is on it

    Code review, QA sign-off, and retros often move responsibility around until nobody is actually holding it.

  3. The 0.1x engineer

    We have 200 features. Customers use about 20% of them. A throwaway Slack joke turned out to be a surprisingly good engineering philosophy.