My time on GDX/Undertrail
When I joined the company in September 2015, the cracks were already showing—not in the people, but in the foundation. The software was a tangled mess, barely holding together under the weight of th...
Your Code Isn’t the Problem. Your Context Is.
A lot of engineers spend their careers writing elegant, well-tested solutions to the wrong problems.They ship flawless implementations of half-baked requirements, lovingly optimize edge cases that no ...
How Big Should Your Engineering Team Be?
Have you ever been on a team where it seemed like it took forever to get anything done? You had constant status meetings and could never seem to get a handle on what was being done. It's not an unusua...
A Practical 10 Step Guide to Networking (the people kind)
When I first started networking... I hated it. I had no idea what I was doing. I felt like an imposter. Part of that was just my natural introversion, but part of it was just not understanding the pra...
The Best Engineers Don’t Block - They Unblock
Everyone wants to be the go-to engineer.
The one who “just gets it done.” The one with the answers. The one who people ping when everything’s on fire.And sure - being the one who saves the day f...
Ask Dumb Questions Early
Because fixing it later costs way more than looking stupid now.
You wrote the code. It works. The tests pass. Your PR is clean.Then someone says:
“Oh… that’s not what we needed.”
No...
Your Team’s Culture Is Written in Your Pull Requests
Not your values doc. Not your town hall. Your PRs.
Everyone loves to talk about team culture - the principles, the rituals, the retros full of optimistic stickies.
But if you want to see how ...
You Can’t Scale If You Touch Everything
You’re not proving your value. You’re burning it.
Some engineers can’t stop touching things.
Every PR, every design doc, every config file that even sniffs in their direction - they’r...
What Is a Tech Lead (And Why It Doesn’t Have to Be a Person)
In the evolving landscape of software development, the role of the tech lead is both crucial and, at times, contentious. Companies vary widely in how they define, implement, or even avoid this role al...
15 Years of Enterprise Software: Lessons Learned Building Scalable Systems
After 15 years in enterprise software development and now as the CEO of Synvra, I've learned crucial lessons about building scalable, maintainable systems. Today, I want to share some key insights tha...