Men, mission, me

A leader's priorities, in order: serve the team, deliver the mission through them, put yourself last. Invert any of the three and you stop leading.

The decision everyone agreed with and no one believed

Unanimous decisions can hide real objections. Psychological safety and structured dissent surface them before sunk costs harden a bad call.

Senior engineers aren't a renewable resource

The supply of senior engineers does not refill itself. Cutting juniors to fund AI tooling looks clean on a quarter but corrodes a five-year horizon.

The bottleneck AI just moved

Generative AI makes writing code faster. That speeds up a step that was rarely the constraint, while piling pressure on the ones that always were.

Why AI speed won't save your system

AI accelerates code creation, but engineering still depends on clarity and judgment. Without taste and good feedback loops, speed compounds the debt.

You can't threaten your way to effective engineering

Effective systems are engineered through sound judgment and deliberate decisions. Fear undermines both at the root.

Your org chart might be your biggest architectural constraint

Architecture mirrors how your teams communicate, not how the wiki diagrams say it should. To change the system, change the org chart first.

The $2M bug that wasn't in the code

A $2M failure no code review would catch. Organizational Behavior is the science of why most projects fail in the human system, not the technical one.

The Remote Engineer's Playbook: From Digital Dojo to Virtual Team Building

Mastering the skills to succeed in remote work without missing a beat in the office

The Inverted Pyramid of Problem-Solving

Scaling the Heights of Impact: A guide for software engineers and the leads who inspire them

Breaking the Curse of Knowledge: Clear communication in a world overflowing with insights

Unraveling the art of making complexity understandable

How to start a blog

Some ideas for your first steps

The Prisoner's Dilemma

How self-interest can undermine a group's outcome

The Secret to Sustainable Motivation

'I would do it but I'm not feeling motivated right now'. How often do you feel like that?

Microservices communications: Publishing messages to a bus in a reliable way

Learn how to avoid double writes, a common pitfall of microservices design

Interview with John Papa at Voxxed Days Athens

A motivational discussion with wonderful career advice for technology professionals

10 indicators that your tech culture is broken (and what you can do about it)

spoiler: DevOps to the rescue

Down the rabbit hole of choosing your first programming language

Making the «right» choice is not as important as you think

The «20% Rule» of Thriving Technology Organizations

Slack time is vital to growth

Three architecture books I keep handing to engineers

The patterns and trade-offs in these books outlast every framework cycle.

Azure Resiliency Patterns: The Key Ingredient

What do we mean by resiliency, why is it so important for cloud systems, and what is it primarily based upon?

NIH: Reinventing the wheel is immoral

The Not Invented Here syndrome is a disease for the software industry. Learn how to spot it and prevent it.

High code churn is not your friend

3+1 root causes of high code churn that can kill your project

The worst mistake of many software startups

Is it all about fast results? What's your true role as an engineer?

Which is more valuable: Good ideas or good people?

Why are we so confused about this?

The Surgeon and the Deadline

Another metaphor about professionalism in software development

The Doctor and the Demanding Patient

A metaphor about professionalism in software development

Consolidating front-end asset processing in ASP.NET projects

Apply modern Building techniques to any version of ASP.NET

Building Angular templates with Razor

'Blending ASP.NET MVC with Angular' post series

A strategic approach for applying software design patterns

Knowing when to act is equally important to knowing when not to

5 tips for effectively pursuing a master's degree in technology

No matter what your reasons are for pursuing a master's degree, here's how to make the most out of it.

Guest speaker at the National College of Ireland

On November the 2nd, I had the honor of being a guest speaker at the National College of Ireland

How Unit Bias can prevent us from designing a better solution

Keeping classes small and focused is key for eliminating both technical debt and numerous code smells

Become a better software developer by bursting the Bubble of Ego

I must admit that I used to be a bit territorial about my code, but not anymore, and let me tell you why.

Books that shaped how I think about software and the teams that build it

Recommended reading on engineering leadership, software architecture, craft, and career.

[Book Review] Learning Microsoft Azure by Geoff Webber-Cross

Geoff provides an excellent starting point for creating sound and maintainable cloud architectures.

[Book Review] The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr

Rewiring the world from Edison to Google

[Book Review] The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Even the best idea can be doomed from day one if the entrepreneur is not familiar with a suitable process needed to turn that idea into a successful company.