Developer Experience in the AI Era — Helping Engineers Stay Competitive

While teaching a Claude workshop, an engineer in the room asked me: how do you think about improving Developer Experience (DevEx) in the AI era? I answered on the spot. This post revisits that as a fully remote CTO. What DevEx used to mean, what AI changed, how leadership provides the environment. The goal: growing engineers who stay competitive in the market, the kind people call excellent even after they move on.

The Stance and Moves of Incident Response — Don't Blame, but the Owner Leads

If you operate systems, incidents are unavoidable. The question isn't whether you cause one, but how you move when it happens. I ask three things of my team. Don't blame the fact that it happened. But have the person closest to the cause take responsibility and lead the response. And let anyone in the room show leadership, regardless of title. Guided by blameless postmortems, Just Culture, and incident command, I work down to the concrete moves.

Why Narcissistic Leaders Resist Remote Work — A Reflection from Running a Fully Remote Organization

A Wharton team has published evidence that the more narcissistic a leader is, the more they resist remote work. The reason isn't productivity or culture, but the loss of the power and status that in-person work supplies. From the seat of an executive and CTO running a fully remote organization, I reflect on this uncomfortable finding a step removed: auditing your own motives, the hidden costs of return-to-office mandates, and remote work as a governance mechanism.