Writing

90 points becomes 120. 120 becomes 150. By Q4 you'd need 500 points a sprint to stay on track. Nobody questions the math because nobody wants to look like the person who can't keep up. If your velocity chart looks like a hockey stick, you don't have a productive team. You have a team that learned how to survive your metrics.

120 points completed. Leadership sees progress. Meanwhile every engineer in the room is staring at the same screen thinking the same thing. That number is fiction. Not because anyone lied. Because the system was never designed to tell the truth about what engineering actually does.

The term has been inflated to mean anything an engineer doesn't like about the codebase. Real debt has interest. It slows delivery, raises defect rates, and creates operational drag the business can feel. If none of that is happening, you're looking at preference with better branding.

We teach technical design. Code architecture. System thinking. All of it assumes the person wants to be a better engineer. What if they don't? The moment you ask someone where they actually want to be in 10 years, everything about how you lead them changes.

Every post above 5,000 impressions shared one trait. Every post below 3,000 didn't have it. The topic didn't matter. The format didn't matter. The time of day didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was whether the reader saw something about themselves they didn't want to see.

I’ve built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud since 2014. I’ve publicly questioned whether Shopify could compete at enterprise scale. Then they changed the game.

Every leadership book tells you to let go, delegate, step back. That's terrible advice. 15 years of building engineering teams taught me the moment you stop understanding how your systems break, you lose the ability to make good decisions about them.

15 years of building engineering teams taught me that culture isn’t what you put on a slide. It’s what happens when the deadline moves up and nobody’s watching.

Agentic commerce isn't a 2030 problem. It's a 2026 problem with a 2015 backend. I've spent over a decade building commerce platforms. Here's what actually breaks when an autonomous agent tries to shop yours.

You call them your best engineer. I call them your single load-bearing wall. Every engineering org has one. And the day they leave, you find out everything you didn’t document, didn’t distribute, and didn’t want to admit was fragile.