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Writing about management, agentic coding, and life in Tokyo.
14 posts
I kept wanting to redesign this site without wanting to lose it. So instead of picking a new look, I built a theme picker into the header.
Your codebase inherits language that nobody decided on. A practical lens for engineering managers on what those defaults say, and how to change them.
After getting my drivers license, I tried to sign up for car sharing. Every form wanted my name in a different format. I wanted to understand why.
Five months, multiple trips to the licence centre, and a stack of used paid holidays. Getting a driver's licence in Tokyo is a journey.
Mini Shai Hulud was a self-spreading npm worm that hit packages across 20+ organizations in a day. This post breaks down how it worked, how to check for it, and how I automated the response.
I inherited a team member with a string of negative performance evaluations. Their peers told a different story. How I formed my own view instead of inheriting the narrative.
A senior engineer's thorough code review left a new graduate in tears. Neither person was wrong. But both needed something the other couldn't provide without a translator in the room.
A re-org. A one-month deadline. And two direct reports who needed to move to a different manager. What I said to them, and what I kept doing afterward.
Four bins, five collection days, and a poster I kept re-reading from the top. So I built a tool to stop holding that in my head.
Not a reading list. Three books I personally return to, and what each one changed about how I think about leading people.
Most foreigners in Japan don't learn about horenso until they've already made the mistake. Here's what nobody tells you before the re-org.
Italy showed us how little we knew about wine. Tokyo is where we're figuring it out.
Rebuilt my personal workspace from scratch. No dotfiles, no setup scripts. The complexity moved out of the config files and into the models.
The gap between managing engineers and being one in this era is wider than I thought. I'm closing it.
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