One of the things I’ve been thinking about for quite a while in organizational settings is how we actually know where we stand. I was having a conversation with my daughter one day, asking her how everything was going at school. She gave me this fascinating response: “I don’t know. The teacher normally tells you how I’m doing, but they don’t tell me how I’m doing.” That was quite an interesting statement. I could see how she’d think like that—for a long time, I used to think the same way. My strategy was simple: as long as I’m not getting any feedback from someone, that’s good enough. ...

When we talk about achieving anything meaningful, it needs to be grounded in good habits and a strong sense of discipline. It can’t be built on wishful thinking alone—it must be rooted in consistent, deliberate action. There’s been plenty written about habit formation, but I’ve found it helpful to think about it through a simpler lens: the idea of pain. The Initial Pain of Doing Things Right Here’s the reality: when you decide a habit needs to change, there’s going to be pain involved. ...

I’ve found one principle particularly useful in my work and life: whatever you’re doing that’s important or complex enough, plan for 10 attempts before you get it right. Starting with Realistic Expectations For example, I’m thinking about restarting my blog. I’ve been away for a while and gained a lot more experience. How do I synthesize that into something meaningful? There’s no point trying to make the first post perfect. In fact, I find it useful to expect it will be bad and write it anyway. I know that before the first good one comes, it’s going to take 10 attempts. ...

Recently, I had an eye-opening experience with my house that really brought home what London is all about—and just how expensive it can be. A window in my place cracked, and what seemed like a minor issue quickly turned into a lesson about London’s housing market reality. The London Housing Demand Crisis Here’s what I’ve realized about London: getting a house is incredibly difficult, and money isn’t even the main problem. The demand for housing is so intense that when someone leaves a property, landlords are practically guaranteed to find a replacement tenant within days—not months, but days. ...

As someone who supports multiple teams while balancing family, friends, and all the responsibilities that come with adult life, I’ve discovered that almost any idea or point can be evaluated along two critical axes. While this builds on Eisenhower’s classic importance-urgency matrix, I’ve developed my own spin that’s transformed how I handle countless priorities and the reality of being a chronic overthinker. Importance vs. Urgency Here’s how it works: ...

Now, I know myself naturally as what you’d call a “worrier”, I am always thinking about what could go wrong. This actually has practical benefits because when I find myself in a project, I’m always thinking: How could this fail? Then, by use of inversion, I try to find ways of stopping that failure from happening. This is a useful mental model on its own. The Power of Flipping the Script However, once you’ve run that model, the question becomes: What happens when you try a different kind of approach? ...

There’s a significant difference between discussing engineering management principles in theory and applying them during real-world crises. This experience taught me valuable lessons about protecting your team while managing business pressure. The Business vs. Quality Paradox The Fundamental Truth Business stakeholders will always prioritize speed over quality. This isn’t inherently wrong it’s simply how business operates. However, the responsibility for maintaining quality standards falls squarely on the engineering team and their managers. ...

Why Energy Management Matters I’ve been thinking about the factors that make you energetic and help you get through the day. The biggest factors I believe are diet exercise and sleep. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot because I’ve come to realize that life is really getting busy. I support a family, multiple teams, small organizations, am active in the community, and I’m still trying to grow myself. All of this takes a lot out of me—time, energy, and capability. As you get into your 30s, most of these responsibilities are really demanding. Having energy to deal with all of that becomes very important. ...

As a software engineering manager, I’ve faced my share of technical challenges, but nothing quite prepared me for the week when our core loyalty points administration system went completely dark. The Perfect Storm LPA The system that orchestrates this entire operation, let’s call it our loyalty platform, had lost connectivity to essential services. We were looking at a potential customer impact that could affect our entire quarterly cycle. The technical details were complex: our replica server in the cloud couldn’t communicate with the master server on-premises, authentication services were down, and network connectivity had been severed due to recent security changes. On top of all of this we are working with a strained organization just from hardening exercises. ...

I recently found myself in a troubleshooting session that taught me an important lesson about assumptions we make in our development workflows. What started as a simple “why won’t this application start?” quickly became a deeper conversation about how we approach dependency management in enterprise environments. The Problem Unfolds One of our engineers was struggling with a Spring Boot application that wouldn’t start on an Azure VM. The error was frustratingly vague - just a “connection reset” message that gave us little to work with initially. But as we dug deeper, the real issue became clear. ...