growth articles

2012, Thursday afternoon, sprint review. Twelve smart engineers, three product people, zero decisions. Every proposal dissolved into “yeah, that could […]

Two weeks ago I sat through a board call with a seed-stage startup. Burn rate north of “I’d rather not […]

Last Tuesday I had three draft CTO offers sitting on my desk — from a fintech, a health-tech, and a […]

When you messaged me last Thursday, if I’m not mixing up my calendar invites — you asked a deceptively simple […]

First week at mindnow, I walked into a planning meeting and instantly felt outclassed — three people were quoting Erlang […]

Dear Reader, I read your note yesterday evening while skimming through a stack of CVs from this semester’s graduates (the […]

Dear Tim, Your note popped up on my screen last Monday around 23:40. I was about to shut the laptop […]

Falsehoods Junior Developers believe about becoming Senior Habits of great software engineers Proper Software Development Estimations Why software projects fail […]

I was approached at a meetup recently right after my talk on system design. Coffee in hand, a junior dev […]

Back when my Linked In still said “Junior Rails Dev (contract)” I had a very cinematic idea of what “Senior” […]

Hello Alex, I still remember the week after my own graduation — half-terrified, half-buzzing on cheap espresso, convinced that one […]

Hello Torb, I keep getting versions of your question in my inbox: “No one hires juniors, what do I do?” […]

Dear Friend, I read your note yesterday morning, coffee still brewing, and the frustration in your words felt familiar (I’ve […]

Last Friday I opened my inbox to yet another message that started with, “I don’t have a CS degree, but […]

I’m typing this a few minutes after we coaxed our production database out of read-only mode. Lights are off, cleaning […]

I still remember a Sunday night last year when my phone would not shut up — PagerDuty, Slack, even a […]

Tuesday night, somewhere between sip three and four of espresso, I caught myself rewriting the same helper function for the […]

I was standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company had put together, feeling like a […]

I spent most of yesterday afternoon watching a junior dev hover over the “send” button in Slack, type a question, […]

That Slack message from someone on my team — dropped at 11 p.m. right after our deployment window — read: […]

The penny dropped for me during a late-night pitch deck review. I was proudly walking the investors through our fault-tolerant […]

The first time someone asked me to be their mentor I almost said no. It was 2012, I was knee-deep […]

I still remember walking into my first sprint planning at mindnow back in 2016 — two whiteboards full of stickies, […]

I still remember sitting in a hostel at 2 a.m., job offer in one hand, fountain pen in the other, […]

⛓ Implementing Atomic Habits in IT 🏆 Promotion-based development 📈 The Toxic Grind ⛓ Implementing Atomic Habits in IT 🏆 […]

The other week I was killing time by the espresso machine in our Zurich co-working space when someone on my […]

I finished “Atomic Habits” on a delayed flight, half-listening to the gate announcements and underlining sentences with the only writing […]

Part of the ongoing Founders Guide. I jot these notes down while the memories are still fresh, so you’re getting […]

Picture this: it’s 7 p.m., the cleaners are vacuuming the hallway of our shared office space, and I’m still fiddling […]

Somewhere around year fifteen of writing code I noticed a weird blind spot. A junior engineer would ask what felt […]

Last autumn I was still at the office at 02:07, waiting for a flaky Jenkins job to turn green. Out […]

Jakob pinged me on Slack at 23:18—one of those “hey, quick question” messages you know isn’t quick. He’d noticed the […]

🎙️ Last Tuesday, stuck in Zurich traffic and running dangerously low on espresso, I queued up an old episode of […]

🔥 Wednesday, 10:13 AM. I had VS Code open, coffee cooling to room temperature, and exactly zero lines of the […]

🤖 I shipped my first “next big thing” sometime in 2010, posted the link on Hacker News, and refreshed the […]