Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Building reliable AI applications isn't about model selection or prompt tricks - it's about observability, evals, and systematic iteration. The teams that ship are the ones who treat AI engineering as empirical discovery, not deductive design.
Engineering managers who become bottlenecks aren't lazy - they're addicted to being needed. Your job is to unblock others first, then systematically eliminate reasons people need you.
Promotions work like jury verdicts - the decision happens emotionally first, then people rationalize it with evidence. Win trust before proving competence, or your career ladder becomes a waiting game.
Most orgs let everything be a priority to avoid hard choices. A single stack-ranked list forces trade-offs, kills silos, and exposes what actually matters. PayPal, Amazon, and Apple proved it works.
Programming culture shifted from valuing craft and learning to treating code as a disposable means to an end. What it feels like to lose a social identity you built your career around.
Real speed comes from tight feedback loops and safety nets, not courage. Fast teams use more information than slow teams - they just don't wait for perfect information before shipping.
Skeptical executives who dismiss psychological safety as "soft" can be engaged through perspective taking - a concrete skill that builds the same collaborative environment while framing it as strategic problem-solving.
Career transitions fail when you chase passion over purpose, turn hobbies into businesses, or try activities without a sustainable model. Here's what actually derails experienced professionals making their next move.
Change requires goodwill you must earn before spending. The architects who drive transformation save political capital slowly through consistent delivery and transparency, then spend it strategically on battles worth fighting.
Technical due diligence isn't one-size-fits-all. What you investigate when buying a company for its customers is wildly different from what matters when acquiring talent or integrating platforms.
When your team member screws up something 'obvious', the problem isn't them - it's what you never wrote down. Unwritten rules are decisions where someone else pays the price.
Asking "What's wrong with this idea?" forces teams to find flaws early rather than seeking approval. It invites challenge, signals psychological safety, and surfaces problems before they hit production.
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Stop apologizing for delayed email replies. Asynchronous communication means no one's waiting, no explanations needed. Reply when you can, or don't reply at all.
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Most tech leaders optimize their stack while ignoring themselves. Time management, communication as leverage, and decision hygiene create massive compounding returns across your entire org.
Stop telling people who they are. Instead, share what you observe: 'You come across as X' beats 'You are X' every time. Precision in language prevents defensive reactions and gets your feedback actually heard.
LLM-assisted coding makes custom code as cheap as importing libraries. The dependency calculus flips: now ask if a problem is hard enough to justify taking on a dependency, not just if a library exists.
Building useful tools beats waiting for international coordination. The Moylan Arrow (that gas gauge indicator) shipped in 3 years and changed the world. AI governance proposals require decades of treaty negotiations.
Writing by hand in a physical notebook forces you to think through code changes before typing them, leveraging the cognitive benefits of physical writing to improve clarity and memory retention.
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Products fail when nothing meaningful happens fast enough to keep curiosity alive. The first 60 seconds aren't about mastery - they're about earning confidence before asking for effort.
CI only has value when it catches mistakes before deployment. When CI passes, you get the same outcome you'd have without CI - just with extra overhead and delay.
Most leadership problems exist because leaders avoid tough questions. These 13 systemic questions expose who benefits, what you've normalized, and which values you drop when pressured.
Managing managers isn't about getting closer to the work - it's about being clearer about what the work actually is. Your job shifts from decision-maker to context-setter and sense-maker.
Product teams burn out when execs think alignment means everyone can recite the same strategic headline, while Sales, Engineering, and Marketing optimize for completely different realities underneath.
Leadership fails when leaders default to character-based explanations under stress instead of examining systems and constraints. These frameworks shift from judging people to diagnosing what makes success difficult.
LLMs are plummeting the cost of servicing technical debt. You should take more shortcuts now and bet on future AI to clean up the mess - the risk-free rate of software development just crashed.
Large tech companies run on systems, not heroes. When you patch inefficiencies through personal sacrifice, you delay necessary systemic change and get punished at promotion time while predatory managers exploit your goodwill.
Remote work blurs home and office boundaries, making it hard to disconnect. Six practical strategies help maintain work-life balance and prevent chronic exhaustion without leaving your house.
High performers get the laziest feedback because managers assume they don't need clarity. Three questions that force your boss to give you actionable direction instead of empty praise.
Speaking up about organizational problems often transforms you from concerned leader to "that person" - even when you're right. The credibility cost of caring out loud.
The Artist who doesn't value humans, The Dictator who bulldozes conversations, The Knife who's inscrutable - all wildly successful leaders, terrible managers. Your job isn't to change them; it's to adapt how you work with each one.
Sabbaticals aren't about productivity or skill-building - they're about unlearning that you're a worker first and human second. Here's how to actually plan one when your career is full of holes and your health insurance is tied to employment.
Leadership means building systems that work beyond your immediate team and asking better questions than you give answers. The real leverage comes from designing operating models that make engineering excellence the default.
Anchor yourself to objectives, not implementations. Early decisions are made with the least information - treating them as sacred just makes learning more expensive.
Frontier AI labs are automating their own research workforces - soon hundreds of thousands of AI agents will work full-time making themselves smarter. This isn't science fiction, it's explicit on every lab's roadmap.
When someone on your team creates problems through poor performance or behavior, most managers wait too long to act. The longer you wait, the more damage they do to team morale and your credibility.
Turn loud, confident opinions into useful data by listening first, separating belief from self, and responding with calm, structured communication to keep teams productive.
Shows how metrics like OKRs, Story Points, Diff Delta, Change Coupling and Google DORA can deliver business value while staying resistant to gaming, with concrete steps to adopt and monitor them.
Managing underperformance isn't just an HR problem - it's a system failure. This framework maps how legal risk aversion, unclear decision rights, and invisible emotional labor create stuck situations, then shows specific moves in each zone.
Coding agents - not chat-based AI - are the future of programming. They work autonomously through entire tasks while you watch, making chat coding obsolete by Q3 2025. The productivity jump is 5x at each wave.
Steven argues that the post-bubble swing from lavish perks back to disciplined, merit-based work is the sustainable path for innovation and morale.
Autonomy without alignment creates fragmentation. Control without autonomy kills innovation. Aligned autonomy resolves this tension by giving teams decision-making freedom within strategic guardrails.
Past help turns into instant support when production breaks. Social capital is trust built through consistent deposits - quick reviews, documentation, mentoring - that lets you withdraw influence when it matters most.
Your job isn't to do the work anymore - it's to make sure other people can be good at theirs. You'll mess up repeatedly, but what matters is owning it and getting better each time.
Interactive visualization mapping the evolution and dependencies of technologies throughout history. Explore how innovations build on each other through a visual, browsable tech tree.
Remote work erases the built-in boundaries of office life. Without deliberate structure, your workday becomes a formless blur where your kitchen is your meeting room and your couch is both rest and email.
The stdlib collection is a community-curated library of practical, immediately useful, battle-tested resources for technical leadership. Each resource is designed to be immediately applicable to your role. New resources are added based on community feedback and emerging best practices.