About

I have a lot of repeated conversations. Chatting with a colleague, I’ll realize, “Oh, we’re about to have the Ownership Talk”. I love these conversations. They help align teams and surface non-obvious considerations around design choices, implementation patterns, working in an organization, etc.

These posts are borne out of those conversations. They’re meant to be useful to me (I occasionally phrase something in a way that I don’t want to forget), and hopefully they’re useful to engineers I know (“Why did Carlin like XYZ again?”). They’re informal. Imagine we’re chatting over lunch.

These are all intensely personal views expressed here. I’m speaking just for me. Not for employers, either past or present.

I don’t expect that you agree with everything here. I’ve tried to lay out why I find each point useful and give personal context that’s relevant. I’ve spent my career in contexts where reliability is paramount. This constrains my worldview in ways that might not be relevant to you. When we disagree, I’m curious about your context.

So, here we are. Welcome. May this be useful to us both.