THE ARCHIVE / 11 DISPATCHES SINCE 2023

Archive.

Everything I've written, dated newest first. Filter by tag, scan by year, click into anything.

ALL LEADERSHIP RUNNING TECH

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2026

2026

Why I Keep My Team Meetings on the Calendar During Vacation

I was on a family vacation last week. I left my team call on the calendar so my team can meet. One thing leaders tend to overlook and employees are trained to overlook is the team call belongs to…

What Running Back From Injury Taught Me About Leading Through Team Setbacks

I just read about Runner's World's 9-step plan for returning to running after injury, and it serves as a good reminder. Last year, I spent weeks sidelined with foot pain I stubbornly ignored until I…

Why Your AI Assistant Knows Nothing About Your Infrastructure (And That's the Real Problem)

Grafana just announced that their Assistant can learn your infrastructure before you even ask questions. Reading this reminded me of a conversation I had with an engineering director last week who…

When Your Best SE Gets Seduced by AI Tooling

Claude Code's latest bug made me laugh - and then cringe. The AI coding assistant was randomly running git reset --hard origin/main against project repos every 10 minutes, essentially nuking…

NYC's 9+1 System is Broken – And It's Teaching Us About Scarcity

I've been watching NYC runners get shut out of races they've run for years, and it's fascinating from a product management perspective. NYRR's 9+1 program was brilliant when the NYC Marathon had…

Why I'm Treating AI Tools Like My Toddler's Sleep Training

Reading about organizations buying AI SRE tools they aren't ready to use reminds me of something happening right in my house. My daughter fights sleep every night despite being exhausted, and…

AI in Observability: We're Still Teaching Computers What a Tree Is

I've been watching our industry get swept up in AI observability promises, and honestly, it reminds me of that Tesla AI Day where they showed how their algorithm needed thousands of examples just to…

Why Steven Spielberg Gets AI Better Than Most Tech Leaders

Spielberg says he's "never used AI" in filmmaking because it can't replace creative people. Meanwhile, most tech leaders are pushing AI everywhere without understanding what it actually…

The One Running Exercise That's Actually Changed My Career

I used to think strength training was just for getting some bulk. Then I hit 40, and with small children, realized it's more important than I gave it credit. My wake-up call came during a…

The Marathon Mindset That Made Me a Better Engineering Leader

Fotyen Tesfay just ran 2:15:55 at 4:59 pace—the second-fastest women's marathon in history. As someone who's chased my own marathon goals for a few years now, watching elite performances like this…

The AI Productivity Reality Check

What's the worst AI productivity mistake you've made? I'll go first: Spent 3 hours trying to get Claude to write my quarterly SE review. The output was so generic I ended up rewriting everything…