newsletter articles

Sustainable development — code should be interesting, not frantic. Longer cycles, fewer all-nighters. Sustainable growth — attract users who already […]

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

Rediscovered the fun of shipping. Felt like 2013 when I hacked random APIs together for the thrill of it. Picked […]

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

Last week I found myself comparing two pull requests: both touched the same service, both under 200 lines, yet one […]

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

Last Thursday I was reviewing a pull-request for a 200-line Swift UI tweak in the morning and helping untangle a […]

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

I still have the ZIP file from 2007. One PHP script, 9 KB, no folders in sight. Hosting was two […]

Networking as an introvert CTO Database Migrations Proper Documentation Habits of great software engineers Networking as an introvert CTO Database […]

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

I still remember my first week at a mid-size telco in 2011. On Monday I pushed a tiny CSS fix; […]

August 1st 2012, 9:30 a.m. on the NYSE open. Knight Capital flips the switch on a new release—and instantly starts […]

I stopped counting how many times I’ve stepped into a new client’s repo expecting Swiss precision and found a Jenga […]

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

I’d rank database migrations right next to dentist appointments and moving apartments on the “things engineers postpone until absolutely necessary” […]

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

Back in 2012 I inherited a codebase that still had Subversion keywords sprinkled all over the files – $Id$, $Author$, […]

Quick disclaimer: I’m still figuring this stuff out like everyone else. If something here feels off, poke holes in it—I […]

2017. I’m two weeks into a “senior developer” gig at a seed-stage startup, happily shipping features, when the founders corner […]

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

I have an irrational love for documentation. Give me a quiet hour, a mug of half-cold espresso, and a blank […]

I once lost half a Sunday to a single question: “How long would it take us to build a mobile […]

I wrapped up my backlog last Tuesday by noon and spent the next hour rearranging sticky notes just so it […]

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

I was staring at a whiteboard the other day, marker in hand, trying to decide whether we should build yet […]

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

I’m jet-lagged, running on too much espresso, and decided to finally hit “publish” on the notes I’ve been stashing in […]

I was re-reading Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech last week (Smithsonian ran a good breakdown in 2017), mostly because YouTube’s algorithm […]

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

Two Fridays ago I picked up a bottle of Swiss pinot to celebrate a long-overdue bonus hitting my account. I […]

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 […]

I still cringe when I think back to the evening I asked my older brother for a small “friends & […]

As you probably guessed from the silence in your inbox — I missed this week’s newsletter slot. Nothing dramatic happened. […]

I spent last week digging through old HR docs, trying to stitch together a halfway decent career ladder for our […]

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 […]

Right after our last sprint review, I overheard someone on my team asking, “So what does our Product Owner actually […]

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 […]

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 […]