people

I spent five and a half years at AWS before moving (back) to Microsoft, where I work today. At Amazon, many meetings began with silent reading. Instead of presenting a document,...

AI-first Engineering is now the operating default in many organizations, including mine. Developers have kept up. Vibe coding became agentic engineering, and the race towards tr...

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team of 8-10 people might have been lucky to have one or two “10x engineers”, or “workhorses”, the kind of engineer that both ...

In today’s shocker, Meta is to “create a new applied AI engineering organization aiming for an ultra-flat structure of up to 50 employees to one manager”.

One of the negative side effects of having any top-down command structure is that every additional layer risks introducing a new level of bureaucracy, which then actively subtra...

The most abused principle in dysfunctional organizations is “Disagree and Commit”. In Don’t Tell Engineers What to Do I said that “telling people what to do, especially if they ...

A famous example where telling Engineers what to do backfired was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor responsible for the ...

You may have landed here because I had just apologized for my obsessiveness over punctuation in a GitHub comment and requested changes to your pull request, or you noticed me ad...

Friday, February 14th is my last day at Amazon.

Should you work on week-ends?

What did you do at work today? How about last week? I spent a couple of days in quarterly business reviews, and wrapped up yearly planning activities for AWS Data Exchange and A...

In my past CTO life I directly managed a VP of Engineering, who managed 2 directors, who managed 6 managers, who managed 30 or so engineers, had peer VP of Product, Head of Desi...

Today I bid farewell to Artsy. This post is my personal journey and my last post as CTO.

It’s no secret that hiring and retaining engineering talent is going to be only more challenging in the years to come. The world’s largest companies across all industries are no...

A Facebook Live interview during CTO Summit NYC 2016 following a talk on Inspiring Team Leads to Give Away Their Legos. The interview recording is no longer available.

I learned about informationals at Microsoft. For any decent developer Engineering managers setup an in-person informational before sending you into a full job interview loop. Th...

I recently published a blog post on LAB, the Life at Artsy Blog entitled “What do Software Engineers Do?”. Its goal is to offer a non-technical perspective to software engineeri...

Update: a recoreded talk based on this post at the CTO Summit @ Nasdaq.

The story of tiny startups upsetting entire industries is old. Here goes David and, once again, conquers Goliath. How did cable companies fail at the internet and are being shre...

A few months ago I asked myself: What does a CTO do?. I divided my attention across three priorities: people, technology and business, spent a lot of time with the entire team, ...

A few months ago I asked myself: What does a CTO do?. I divided my attention across three priorities: people, technology and business, spent a lot of time with the entire team, ...

You have recently graduated and looked for work. You put together a good resume and e-mailed it around. You got some interest from a few tech companies and maybe programming hom...

I recently worked on the Artsy Engineering Compensation Framework, and more specifically on the Engineering ladder, open-sourced today. I have done this before, but never with s...

tl;dr Watch this video instead!

I had a great conversation with Aliaksandr Astapenka and Pavel Paulau about open-source on CTOCast #6. It’s in Russian. CTOCast подкаст о технологиях, процессах, инфраструктуре ...

I find myself on all sides of the remote engineering debate. I have managed large remote teams from China to Argentina. I have a handful of remote engineers today at Artsy in pl...

I had the pleasure and privilege of talking about my startup experiences in Switzerland in the 90s and more recently at Artsy in New York at a lunch organized by Swissnex. The a...

I was showing Inez & Vinoodh’s Stephanie Seymour’s photograph on Artsy to a friend. “Beautiful!”, she exclaimed and clicked on the Inez & Vinoodh artist profile. I lost ...

Facebook’s GIT repository is a single 54GB animal that builds Facebook. It’s not that big - they haven’t seen the MS Windows one! Actually, I take that back - anecdotal evidence...

“Wednesday night’s American Horror Story: Coven delivered an interesting theory on youth culture: Millennials are actually dead inside.” I’m quoting Bustle’s article, which quot...

This year my colleagues at Artsy created a formal fellowship program. We went out to many US colleges to recruit some of the brightest seniors. From thousands of applications we...

I visited a friend who lives in a remote, tropical region of the United States. He’s a doctor and a practicing eye surgeon. The island has both the very rich and the extremely p...

A resume is what you did, it’s not who you are.

When I joined Microsoft in ‘99 I was taught how to properly interview candidates. I was shown the wheel of competencies, a kind of a wheel of fortune where a color represents th...

I had a short, but lively debate over code reviews with @skamille at New York’s QCon 2012. That same day she wrote an interesting blog post on code reviews. She argues that “cod...

Last night I gave a talk on pressing the big scary red reset button at the NY CTO School. The first talk before me was by @malcolmcasey, CTO of Skillshare, another awesome NYC s...

I wrote a blog post yesterday about How to Start Small With Big Data and Google Analytics. Essentially, it’s a jumpstart for fetching Google Analytics pageviews and merging the ...

I want to talk about your scope of influence as a Software Engineer and how to expand it.

I talked to a developer recently. He said:

I am not a patient person. But years of software practice have taught me how to take my time while coding or how to, otherwise, remove time from the equation.

I read Bertrand’s post on “Tales from the Evil Empire” about him leaving Microsoft this morning. Congratulations. We have never met, but your blog was in my RSS feed for a very ...

I mean, I am flattered to be #20 of the most poachable techies in NYC list, and you got about half of your facts right (eg. my Github account) but seriously?

I got 5 seconds around 1m20.

This was in my drafts for years, a story from a past life …

I really enjoy the conversation with software architects on how to make technology choices. I polled the members of the New York CTO club on the topic and got amazing war storie...

… read my previous post first …

This thread just popped up on the MongoDB users list: [JOB]Full time Developer w/ MongoDB experience for a Fortune 1000 client in NYC!.

This is somewhat of a continuation of the unexpectedly popular story of my commute and the unofficial guide of moving to New York for software engineers.

This is somewhat a continuation of the unexpectedly popular story of my commute.

We’ve been trying to fix an issue with our continuous integration where Capybara tests were failing, but the CI process reported success. Rather annoying for CI!

I just mentioned someone’s promotion to one of the person’s colleagues after seeing it on their updated LinkedIn profile. The reaction was not quite what I expected.

My class sold out tonight with over 40 people attending. If you were there, thank you so much! It’s really rewarding to have an engaged audience where nobody even moved when Bra...

This morning, Dan Croak, chief marketing officer at Thoughtbot, has finally come forward as an amazing open-source contributor. All his previous contributions to the core Rails ...

This morning OpenSource.com published my new article: How to become and amazing contributor to an open-source project.

My second article on opensource.com. You got to love the graphics that the site designer picked! It speaks to the concept of “solving complexity”.

Thanks to everyone for attending my “Breaking the Software Death Cycle with DDD” presentation last night at the DDD meet-up at Microsoft. It looks like the topic turned out to b...

Here’s a disruptive idea for the corporate world: let’s get rid of the traditional “open headcount”.

In the past six months I’ve done dozens of engineering interviews for our many job openings, including developers and team leads. We’ve hired some excellent people in this proce...

This is a story of corporate change. It’s a tale about how an unlikely organization embraced open-source. It starts with pain and suffering and may even read like an “I hate my ...

TeamSHATTER.com went live yesterday. SHATTER is the AppSecInc team that researches database security vulnerabilities and publishes advisories that have been trusted by the indus...

Someone finally convinced me to sign-up on Twitter, follow me: @dblockdotorg. I’ll keep it brief.

I feel like I live in this presentation by Mary Poppendieck: The Tyranny of the Plan.

Someone forwarded me Joel Spolsky’s article, The Duct Tape Programmer. I think Joel must have been a manager for far too long.

I was reading Raymond Chen’s “The Old New Thing” on my way home in the NY subway yesterday. I met Raymond once @ MSFT, and he probably doesn’t remember me, but over the last few...

I feel very inspired by Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing: Tales from the Interview posts, so here’s one from my own.