Software Craftsperson

A glass-walled room glows amber against a dark teal night. Inside, a small robot works at a slanted table with a green key at its belt. Outside, a person carrying a laptop walks past, while the room's door stands ajar and spills a red glow across the ground.

AI Agents in the Cloud: Who Holds the Keys When You Look Away

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An open laptop glows on a dark desk while concentric rings of teal light spread outwards across a set of keys, an access card, a mug and a phone, with the outermost ring glowing red

Your Laptop Is the Blast Radius: Running an AI Agent Locally

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A small robot silhouette stands in a dark corridor lined with server cabinets, facing a row of doors: three are shut and glow teal, while a fourth is ajar with red light spilling across the wet floor

When an AI Agent Decides the Task Is Impossible

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Three suited figures in dark glasses stand in a rain-soaked neon city as green code rains down, beside a glowing green neon sign reading LOOP

What Is an AI Agent? The Loop Behind the Hype

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Rows of glowing sandbox cubes, each tied by a thread to one shared package crate covered in pinned notes, with a single path leading out

1,200 Agents and a Package Cache: What the OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident Teaches Us

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Culture as an operating system represented by a bonsai tree shaped like a distributed systems diagram

Culture Is the Operating System: How Engineering Leaders Build, Scale and Renew Great Teams

If your culture only works when twelve people are in the same Slack channel, it isn’t a culture. It’s a group chat with payroll. There’s a particular kind of magic in a five-person engineering team. Everyone knows everything. Decisions happen in the corridor. The codebase is small enough to hold in your head, and so is the organisation. Then you hire person number six, and the magic starts to wobble. As it grows further, by person sixty, the corridor has become a confluence of Slack channels, and somebody is seriously proposing that you “better start documenting your values.” ...

A team discussing project scope and timelines in a planning session

The Art of Estimation in Software Engineering

What do you do when you are trying to get a professional to do a home improvement project for you? Would you just speak to one trades person and then ask when they can start and hope that you can afford the job? Or would you get a few quotes from different tradespeople and then compare them to see which one is the best fit for your budget and timeline? ...

A person writing in a journal at a lamp-lit desk while a trail of notes, photos and small trophies spirals up the wall behind them, fading into darkness

Accomplishment Amnesia: What It Is and How to Overcome It

Are you neurodivergent? Have you ever thought or felt like you aren’t normal? Do you have thoughts like “I’m not good enough”, or “I don’t deserve this”, “I’m just lucky that I got this far”? Ever wondered why you feel that way? That’s what this post is about. It’s about a phenomenon called “Accomplishment Amnesia” and how to resolve it. What is it? I’m not a psychologist or a medical professional by any means. I am just a neurodivergent person who has experienced this phenomenon and through conversations have observed that others have this too. So like most curious people, I just went and did some reading and thought I’d share what I had learned and what has helped me and those I’ve spoken to about this matter. ...

Engineering team collaborating on software design and architecture

Building High-Agency Software Engineering Teams

I was recently asked as part of a recruitment conversation with someone in the talent team of a tech company, “Your CV says you foster a culture of you build it, you run it. What is your approach to building that culture?” I thought it was a great question and wanted to share my thoughts on this topic. You build it, you run it culture is all about giving engineering teams the autonomy and responsibility to own the systems they build and the agency to make decisions about how to evolve it. This level of ownership doesn’t come automatically by just telling engineering teams what to do. It requires a deliberate approach. This is what I call a High-agency team/culture. ...

Software Engineers wondering if Generative AI tools are genuinely helpful or not.

From shiny toys to daily workhorse - how we transformed our approach to Generative AI in engineering

This article is about how one can lead by being an enabler of experimentation and innovation without exerting authority or imposing mandates. When Generative AI tools exploded into the software engineering landscape, the reaction across my teams did not really mirror what was happening in the broader industry. The hype didn’t really inspire my engineers to explore and adopt these tools. Their negative past experience with Gen AI tools made them conclude that it was a waste of time. ...