The Long Commit

I’ve always been looking to be more productive, not just to produce more and better outcomes, but also because productivity feels great, and when I’m feeling productive, I’m, in general, feeling much better.

Everyone has different management styles, but I believe there are some fundamental things that when done could strengthen the relationship with your team.

I’m not a big poster on X, but I read my X timeline more than I’d like to, and I think it sometimes influences how I think about or see certain topics.

I didn’t want to write about this.

Around August last year, I started transitioning into a management position at Okta, leading the Auth0 content team and moving from an IC role.

Since the last update to ChatGPT voice, I’ve been enjoying talking to it while driving, and since I have a daily commute of about 30 minutes, I’ve been talking with it a lot.

A DACI is a lightweight way to make decision ownership explicit before work stalls.

An AI score can describe a process.

The merged PR can be excellent while the source of judgment remains unclear.

For most of my career, I was an individual contributor.

The first months of management can turn into an unprioritized list of legitimate demands: 1:1s, feedback, hiring, planning, delivery, technical context, stakeholder expectations, and your own learning.

A compact Notion template for recording a technical decision, the options considered, and the consequences worth revisiting later.

Clarify what a Staff engineer or tech lead is expected to own before an ambiguous leadership role turns into conflicting expectations.

Turn a vague career direction into a plan you can return to.

Keep a useful record of work that becomes difficult to reconstruct once a project has moved on.

A lightweight Notion template for keeping recurring 1:1s focused without turning them into status meetings.

Polish changes perception.

A team is in planning.

Most AI apps started from a reasonable fear.

The easiest place for an AI rollout to look successful is the velocity dashboard.

The easiest mistake in a code review is stopping when the code runs.

Tokenmaxxing had a short half-life.

Let me start with a story: A senior engineer opens a pull request, everything looks good, the tests pass, the description is clean, the diff is a bit long but nothing crazy.

A product manager opens Cursor on a Tuesday afternoon.