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16Sep 201824 Mar 2021

Software Engineering Leadership

Software Engineer leadership is where you lead/manage a number of software engineers, directly or via another manager(s). Your title could…

19Mar 20182 Dec 2018

Leadership by Example

This blog post is a continuation from a previous one called Leading Leaders “We must be the change we wish…

21Jan 201819 Mar 2019

Leading leaders

Maybe you are a Director, a Head of X or a Vice President, and you now own a department or…

We are humans not resources

2 Nov 20216 Nov 2021

I strive to never refer to another Human as a resource. I see this as diminishing another human. It encourages the use of humans as cogs in a factory, or…

Becoming a CTO

Getting to be an actual Chief Technology Officer for me has being about standing on shoulders of so many engineers who have coached me, mentored me, educated me, listened to…

A year at SpotHero leading Engineering PT 5 – COVID-19

27 May 202027 May 2020

Now Covid-19 -> Not Scaling March 2020 -> Throughout the whole US Parking sector, revenue dropped by 90% due to COVID-19 (Stay at Home Orders/WFH). As an Executive, we wrote…

A year at SpotHero leading Engineering PT 4 – product

27 May 202027 May 2020

Product May 2019 We are a two sided marketplace - Consumers on one side (Parkers) and Operators (Owners/management of Parking facilities) on the otherWe were not Product led as a…

A year at SpotHero leading Engineering PT 3 – Technology

27 May 202027 May 2020

Technology May 2019 The SpotHero monolith is Python/DjangoThe Parking Panda monolith is c#/.net (SpotHero acquired Parking Panda in Spring 2017)We were extracting core functionality from our monolith to build out…

A year at SpotHero leading Engineering PT 2 – People

27 May 202027 May 2020

People- May 2019 The Product and Engineering was about 50 peopleOffices in Chicago HQ, Baltimore and a couple remote WFHMost Engineering Managers had over 10-14 engineers to serveOur focus and…

A year at SpotHero leading Engineering

27 May 202027 May 2020

I will talk about the year in five parts/posts: Scaling -> Governance, People, Technology ProductNot Scaling -> COVID 19 May 2019 - The company had been without a VP of…

Summer Improv Intensive 2 @ Annoyance Theatre

1 Jun 20192 Jun 2019

Annoyance Theatre, based in Chicago, USA, does Summer Intensive classes in Improv that last a full work week, Monday to Friday, 10am to 4.45pm. Last year I did the first…

Numenera Character Sheets

These were designed for second edition of the Numenera Roleplaying game. I designed these to be functionally sheets as you grow from Tier 1 to Tier 5. Page 1 -…

Science Fiction

Top Science Fiction Books

24 Nov 201821 Dec 2018

These are some my favorite science fiction books, most are the start of a series or trilogy. These are not in order: Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1) by Alastair Reynolds…