Staying Hands-On: Keeping Your Technical Edge in Leadership
I have spent enough time in leadership to know the standard story.
In that version, you start technical. You move into management. You become strategic. If all goes well, you eventually stop touching the technical work except at a safe rhetorical distance. Your value is supposed to migrate upward into vision, people, budgets, and influence.
I understand why that story exists. At some level it is true. An executive who insists on writing production code to prove relevance is usually solving the wrong problem.
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What Mentors Get From Mentoring
When people talk about mentorship, they usually focus on what the mentee gets: advice, support, perspective, encouragement, access.
All of that matters. But it's only half the story.
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Mentorship and Coaching: Growing the Next Generation of Tech Leaders
I've mentored engineers who became executives. I've also mentored engineers who would have been better served by a different approach from me — giving advice when they needed space, or autonomy when they needed direction.
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Pattern Recognition: How Knitting Prepared Me for Engineering and Leadership
I used to own a knitting shop. This is perhaps the most unexpected sentence I could write in a piece about technology leadership, so let me explain why it belongs here.
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The Month Pneumonia Rewrote My Retirement
For years, retirement lived in my head as a clean transition. Finish strong, downshift, start traveling with a clear plan and an open calendar. What I did not plan for was pneumonia taking five weeks of the timeline I did not have to spare.
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