A few weeks ago, Rich, who looks after growth for us, opened his first pull request against our codebase. He’s almost up to his hundredth. They range from SEO, our main growth driver, to new UI fea...

I haven’t written code by hand in months, and I’ve never felt busier. That might sound like a contradiction, but it’s the key to understanding where software engineering is headed. If you’ve been u...

I’m currently in the process of hiring engineers at Jitty because we actually need people. That got me thinking about the hiring process and all the mistakes I’ve made over the years, including mak...

I’ve been meaning to write something about why I’ll likely never go back to an in-office role, and why hybrid working is unworkable, but I’ve been struggling to find the right angle. A company appr...

How much time have you spent arguing whether you should build something or not, while you’ve been sitting there thinking “I could have built it in the time we’ve spent arguing about this”? Probably...

I’ve spent a lot of the last two-plus decades integrating systems, whether that was the goal of the project itself, or just a necessary part of a larger project. Integrations always take longer tha...

It’s received wisdom in the startup world that you need to have a staging environment to test things out before going to production. In some cases, maybe even multiple staging environments with dif...

Product managers spend aeons creating and rearranging them. Delivery managers obsess over their dates and dependencies. People in “the business” plan financials, campaigns, and more around them. Bu...

Most job specs are awful. They have a “main responsibilities” section filled with vague generic bullet points listing things you’ll never actually do, followed by an interminable disjointed list of...

If you thought about it for long enough, you would invent domain-driven design. This is a talk I gave at DevLab ‘21 about deriving domain-driven design from first principles to demonstrate that it’...