Technology Leader's Desk Reference

I run about twenty engineers.

For most of my career, allocating work was simple.

Back in January, I wrote a piece called The Cockpit Has to Change Too.

You read an argument that would have moved you, but the person making it is wrong about something else — politics, a public feud, AI safety, whichever — and you find yourself unable to take the argument seriously.

Engineering is an outcome-focused discipline, and the outcome has not changed in the entire history of the profession.

Practices that were nice-to-have for humans become load-bearing for agents.

Six months ago, I wrote that a flood was coming.

We run three backend languages.

For the first time in a while, I have open headcount.

The prevailing narrative goes something like this: agents are getting better, fast.

For decades, large software systems were hard to build.

I recently wrote a post arguing that Atlassian faces serious structural risk in an agentic development world.

The taxonomy describes roles.

I'm actively rolling out agentic development across my engineering organization.

In 1975, a man named John Riccardo became CEO of the Chrysler Corporation.[1] Chrysler was in a bad place.