Engineering leadership judgement for the real world
I have spent 30 years building things for the web — first as a developer, then as a technical director, and latterly as a VP leading software engineering and architecture at scale.
I work with engineering and product organisations to help them get out of their own way.
Most teams don't struggle because they lack ideas or capable people — they struggle because the system they're working within has gradually become the constraint.
These days I spend most of my time thinking about how teams actually work, why delivery systems fail, and why technology problems are almost never technology problems — they're almost always people, process, structure, or time problems.
This site is where I collect practical thinking, opinions, and side projects in one place.
If you want the longer backstory, read more on the About me page.
Current focus
Right now I am thinking hard about how AI changes engineering organisations beyond the tooling layer.
That means looking at judgement, team structure, capability development, delivery pressure, and the uncomfortable fact that AI is moving faster than most organisations can adapt.
The interesting question is not simply how teams can ship faster with AI. It is how they can move faster without becoming more fragile or creating the kind of low-trust, high-debt systems that come back to bite them six months later.
We also need to consider the key leadership behaviours that either enable or undermine all of it.
Working together
Some of that thinking turns into consulting work, where I help engineering and product organisations understand what's really getting in their way and identify the smallest practical intervention that will improve the system.
If you lead engineering teams, think about how software gets built and shipped, or are trying to understand what AI actually changes about your organisation, you're probably in the right place.
If that sounds interesting, I offer Engineering Judgement for Hire.
Start here
The best place to start is the Thinking page, which brings together the themes I keep coming back to: speed, quality, judgement, capability, AI, and time.
Recent blog posts
Less T-shaped, more tree-shaped
24 Aug 2026
The T-shaped individual has been a stalwart of tech teams for years (decades, even), but I think it's time to change the typographic analogy. It's time to be more tree-shaped.
Is my AI showing?
3 Aug 2026
On turning a run of AI-assisted blog posts into a proper essay, what an AI told me about my own writing, and why most of the 'AI giveaways' turned out to be things I was already doing in 2009.
The Two-Thirds Horizon - Engineering Judgement and careers after 50
31 Jul 2026
I'm 51 years old. Almost exactly two-thirds of the way through my expected working life. I have somewhere between 6 and 16 years remaining until I can draw down on my pension and hopefully commit to a life of leisure for however many years remain on the clock. My current role is coming to an end on 31 August, so what do I want to fill that final third of my working life with?
So it seems the former BrewDog CEO still doesn't know when to wind his neck in...
16 Jul 2026
James Watt is hubris personified. He literally doesn't know when to stop.
Whose future is it anyway? Part 5: The narrow path to prosperity
9 Jun 2026
A better outcome from AI is possible, but not inevitable. It depends on how we balance capability, agency, speed, and time.