The Dispatch
Engineering management, team building, and organizational influence. · View all
Note-Taking for Engineers: The System Matters Less Than Having One
Nothing is more frustrating for a senior engineer than repeating guidance they've already given. Nothing is more avoidable than building a note-taking habit that captures it the first time.
Observability at Work and at Home: The Case for Early Intervention
The same principle applies everywhere: if you wait until the system is on fire to start looking at metrics, you've already lost. Early signals exist. You just have to be watching.
Growing Engineers: The Long Game of People Development
The best infrastructure I've ever built isn't a server cluster or an automation framework. It's a team of engineers who can make decisions I'd trust without being in the room.
Documentation as a Leadership Practice
Every undocumented system is a single point of failure wearing a person's name. Documentation isn't a nice-to-have. It's a resilience strategy.
Blast Radius: Why Infrastructure Teams Build Tools
Infrastructure teams build tools because their blast radius is enormous. When your work touches every application in the organization, the leverage of a good tool (or the damage of a bad one) scales differently than it does for an application team.
Making Work Visible: Data-Driven Conversations with Leadership
If your team's work isn't visible, it doesn't exist in the minds of the people who control headcount, budget, and priorities. Data fixes that, but only if you present it in a language leadership actually speaks.
LLMs as a Team Multiplier: Driving Innovation Without Losing the Human
The value of AI on my team isn't that it writes code for us. It's that it lowers the activation energy for engineers to try things they wouldn't have attempted otherwise.
Minecraft, Hackathons, and the Case for Unstructured Creativity
My kid builds redstone contraptions with no spec and no deadline. My engineers build their best prototypes under the same conditions. The pattern isn't a coincidence.
Lowest Common Denominators: Managing 13 Engineers and 2 Kids
Both roles require the same voice: not a dictator, but a facilitator who removes blockers. The overlap is bigger than you think.