management articles
📉 Valueless CTO: High Salary, No Return
Two weeks ago I sat through a board call with a seed-stage startup. Burn rate north of “I’d rather not […]
I have a very poor work-life balance. How can I escape the grind?
Dear Tim, Your note popped up on my screen last Monday around 23:40. I was about to shut the laptop […]
🤯 Mental Health in Software Engineering
Falsehoods Junior Developers believe about becoming Senior Habits of great software engineers Proper Software Development Estimations Why software projects fail […]
What to expect from the dev agency after MVP is done?
Dear JK, Your message landed in my inbox late Friday night, right as I was about to close the laptop […]
How to better handle stress in a startup?
I’m typing this a few minutes after we coaxed our production database out of read-only mode. Lights are off, cleaning […]
💻 Startup Infrastructure: Scaling from Zero to Enterprise
I still have the ZIP file from 2007. One PHP script, 9 KB, no folders in sight. Hosting was two […]
🧳 Handling Process Debt in IT
I still remember my first week at a mid-size telco in 2011. On Monday I pushed a tiny CSS fix; […]
😵 Postmortems in Software Development
August 1st 2012, 9:30 a.m. on the NYSE open. Knight Capital flips the switch on a new release—and instantly starts […]
🤹♂️ Habits of great software engineers
Tuesday night, somewhere between sip three and four of espresso, I caught myself rewriting the same helper function for the […]
🤝 Networking as an introvert CTO
I was standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company had put together, feeling like a […]
🏰 Aging Code
Back in 2012 I inherited a codebase that still had Subversion keywords sprinkled all over the files – $Id$, $Author$, […]
🎭 Managing difficult software engineers
Quick disclaimer: I’m still figuring this stuff out like everyone else. If something here feels off, poke holes in it—I […]
As a non-technical founder what should I be doing while the product is developed?
I still remember sitting in a co-working space in 2014, watching my co-founder demolish the keyboard like he was racing […]
👾 What does a CTO actually do?
2017. I’m two weeks into a “senior developer” gig at a seed-stage startup, happily shipping features, when the founders corner […]
🙏 Being a good mentor – a developers guide
The first time someone asked me to be their mentor I almost said no. It was 2012, I was knee-deep […]
📚 Healthy Documentation
I have an irrational love for documentation. Give me a quiet hour, a mug of half-cold espresso, and a blank […]
💩 Bullsh*t Jobs
I wrapped up my backlog last Tuesday by noon and spent the next hour rearranging sticky notes just so it […]
📜 Contracts you should never sign
I still remember sitting in a hostel at 2 a.m., job offer in one hand, fountain pen in the other, […]
🤝 Engineering Scarcity Mindset
⛓ Implementing Atomic Habits in IT 🏆 Promotion-based development 📈 The Toxic Grind ⛓ Implementing Atomic Habits in IT 🏆 […]
🌈 Hedonic Treadmill
Two Fridays ago I picked up a bottle of Swiss pinot to celebrate a long-overdue bonus hitting my account. I […]
💂♂️ Fake it till you make it
The other week I was killing time by the espresso machine in our Zurich co-working space when someone on my […]
🚪 Exit. Selling your SaaS
This piece belongs to the ongoing Founders Guide. I’m scribbling down everything I wish I’d had on my desk during […]
⛓ Implementing Atomic Habits in IT
I finished “Atomic Habits” on a delayed flight, half-listening to the gate announcements and underlining sentences with the only writing […]
How to hire first rockstar employee
Picture this: it’s 7 p.m., the cleaners are vacuuming the hallway of our shared office space, and I’m still fiddling […]
💻 Embracing Hacker Culture
This piece is part of the Technical Manager Guide. Think of it as field notes from someone who’s broken more […]
🎃 We’ll add it to the backlog
Last Tuesday I grabbed a cappuccino at ViCAFE, the tiny kiosk next to Bürkliplatz. On the tram I ended up […]
🎯 What does a Product Owner do all day?
Right after our last sprint review, I overheard someone on my team asking, “So what does our Product Owner actually […]
🎭 Owning up to your mistakes
Jakob pinged me on Slack at 23:18—one of those “hey, quick question” messages you know isn’t quick. He’d noticed the […]
🥇 The unfair advantage
🎙️ Last Tuesday, stuck in Zurich traffic and running dangerously low on espresso, I queued up an old episode of […]
🔥 Battling daily procrastination
🔥 Wednesday, 10:13 AM. I had VS Code open, coffee cooling to room temperature, and exactly zero lines of the […]
🔥 Do things, tell people
🤖 I shipped my first “next big thing” sometime in 2010, posted the link on Hacker News, and refreshed the […]
⛳ Moving Forward in times of uncertainty
Last Thursday I caught myself doom-scrolling at 6:30 am—coffee still brewing, half-awake, already tense. I’ve lived through recessions, the dot-com […]
🏄♂️ Self-Organizing Teams
This piece belongs to the ongoing Technical Manager Guide. I’m writing it for leads who suddenly find themselves in charge […]
🧩 Dealing with complexity
This piece is part of the ongoing Founders Guide. I’m jotting these notes while helping a handful of first-year startups wrestle […]
🤖 How to Hire a CTO for Your Startup
This piece belongs to the ongoing Founders Guide. I’m jotting these notes while helping first-year founders stay afloat — the things […]
🕸️ How to build remote teams properly
This piece belongs to the Technical Manager Guide I’m slowly publishing for leads who want to scale without turning into […]
⏱️ How to run efficient meetings with engineers
🚀 Founders Guide 2022 📚 Q&A for Startup Founders 📰 Previous Newsletter Issues 🛠️ How to be a better technical […]
🐥 Helping your Interns / Juniors grow
The first intern I ever coached arrived with an almost comical amount of enthusiasm. I had no onboarding checklist back […]
🦸♂️ Lessons learned from becoming CTO of a small startup
Update 2021: I first drafted this piece back in 2018, roughly eighteen months after I took over engineering at a […]