New Manager Essentials: A Practical Guide to Your First Months in Leadership
A practical and thoughtful guide for new software engineering managers. Learn how to build trust, avoid micromanagement, run effective 1:1s, and navigate your first months with clarity.
The Work of Building for Other Engineers: Platform & SRE Mindset
Recently, I’ve seen this thread on subreddit, and got inspired.
What do you wish someone told you when you became a SRE/Platform/DevOps engineer?
In this post, I reflect on what it really means to be a software engineer who builds for other engineers. I share stories from my early career, key mindset shifts from SRE and platform work, and three human-centered principles that can help you become a multiplier in your organization.
What “managing up“ really means: A Practical Guide to Working with Your Manager
Managing up might sound like corporate jargon, something only senior folks or managers in big companies worry about. But in reality, it’s something most of us do, consciously or not, as part of everyday work.
In this post, I share what managing up really means, how I came to understand it more deeply after becoming a manager myself, and a set of practical, human-centered ways to build a clearer, more supportive relationship with your own manager. Whether you’re an engineer or a first-time manager, I hope this gives you something useful to work with.
Three Guiding Lights on Sustaining Resilience
When it comes to building reliability and resilience, there’s no perfect checklist. But there are a few grounding ideas I keep coming back to, especially when things get messy.
In this post, I share three principles that continue to guide my work: focusing on what really matters to users, creating psychological safety around failure, and letting incidents shape what we learn and prioritize.
You Don’t Have to Burn Out to Deserve a Break: A Story About Work, Rest & Rediscovery
Burnout doesn’t always hit all at once. Sometimes, it creeps in slowly —so slowly that by the time you recognize it, you’re already running on empty. I didn’t realize how far I’d pushed myself until I reached a point where I literally couldn’t stand the sight of my computer.