👋 You’re a brilliant engineer. You’ve mastered the code, earned respect, and now… you’ve been promoted. Suddenly, the job isn’t just about solving technical problems - it’s about leading humans.

That’s where many engineers struggle. Delegation feels awkward. Communication breaks down. Imposter syndrome creeps in. What once made you successful - technical mastery - no longer feels like enough.

Meanwhile, if you’re a CEO or CTO, you’ve seen this story before: your rockstar IC gets promoted… and flounders. The team loses momentum. You risk losing both a great engineer and a leadership pipeline.

👉 That’s why I created coded2lead: a coaching program built specifically for engineers making the IC→leader leap.

With 20+ years scaling teams and shipping software at global scale, I’ve lived both sides of this challenge. Now I help:

Engineers: Develop emotional intelligence, leadership confidence, and the skills to multiply team impact.

Executives: Build a leadership bench you can trust, without burning out your best talent.

✨ My approach blends the rigor of engineering with the nuance of human connection - practical tools + emotional intelligence = sustainable leadership growth.

If you or your engineers are navigating this transition, let’s talk.

📅 Book a coaching intro call: coded2lead.com

Do in-person tech conferences still matter in a remote-first world?

For years, my answer was no.

I used to see conferences as a duty - something you "had to do" as a leader.
Summon your extroversion. Put on the social armor. Survive the vendor pitches masquerading as talks.

Honestly? When the world shut down, I didn’t miss them for a second.

So when I went to speak at the Tech Leader Summit in Clearwater Florida last week, I expected more of the same.

I could not have been more wrong.

This event felt fundamentally different... and it reminded me why in-person experiences still matter more than ever.

The summit is run by NFJS: No Fluff Just Stuff.
Or as I think of it: All Killer, No Filler.

Their events are of the developers, by the developers, for the developers - and for the leaders who actually care about building healthy engineering cultures.

They’re independent. High-signal. Zero vendor agenda.
Yes, there are sponsors. But the content feels refreshingly untouched by them.

What struck me most was the intention behind the experience:
✔️ Sessions that teach, not pitch.
✔️ A schedule designed for humans, including introverts - with real breaks to reflect, recharge, or connect.
✔️ An environment that encourages genuine conversations, not hallway elevator pitches.
✔️ A location that makes you remember you’re allowed to enjoy yourself.

I walked away energized, not depleted.
Inspired, not marketed to.
More connected to my craft - and to the people who care about elevating it.

If you're debating whether to try another conference, I highly recommend checking out NFJS.

📢I want to hear from you:
What’s your experience been? Are in-person conferences still worth it for tech leaders and practitioners, or have they had their time?

Robert N. Harris

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Helping Brilliant Engineers Become Emotionally Intelligent Leaders | Founder, coded2lead | Coaching Engineers, CTOs & CEOs Through IC→Leader Transitions

You can make any team overperform… if you don’t care how long they survive. 

Are you treating your team like a "One-Lap Engine?”

I recently read a story from the turbo era of Formula 1 that fascinated me.

In the mid-1980s, BMW built what’s widely considered the most powerful F1 engine ever. A 1.5-liter turbocharged, four-cylinder monster. In qualifying trim, it produced over 1,400 horsepower. Enough to leave every competitor in the dust.

There was one catch: that power was unsustainable. The engine might survive a single lap before it risked catastrophic failure. Outrageous output came at the cost of longevity. They could only use it for qualifying, where all you needed was one fast lap... a vanity metric.

It got me thinking about software teams, and how they're often expected to run at - or beyond - maximum power continuously. 

We can “turbocharge” a team too. Push harder. Cut corners. Ignore rest and balance. The velocity skyrockets. Deadlines get hit. Metrics shine. 

But, like that BMW engine, that kind of peak performance often lasts only a single sprint, or a single project, before burnout or attrition blows the whole system up.

True leadership isn't about extracting extreme output until the team self-destructs. It’s about:

🏎️ Knowing your team’s limits and respecting them.

🏎️ Injecting energy strategically, not recklessly.

🏎️ Building systems and culture that sustain high performance over months and years, not just an iteration.

Emotionally intelligent leadership is about balancing ambition with care. Yes, we want performance. Yes, we want results. But the best leaders know: power without sustainability is just spectacle.

Next time you feel the temptation to push the team past its limits, remember the BMW one-lap monster. Incredible in the moment. Deadly if mismanaged. Ultimately ephemeral.

Sustainable teams, like well-tuned engines, win championships over time.

How are you tuning yours? For speed... or longevity?

If your team needs a building to have culture... you don’t have a culture. You have a terrarium. 🐸

Last week at Tech Leader Summit I gave a talk on how to shape your engineering team's culture.

Afterwards I kept getting the same question over and over again:
"Will any of this work for a remote team?"

Do remote teams have a culture?

The prevailing wisdom is that they don't.
That's a myth.

You can have a strong culture on remote teams, but only if you design for it.

Here's what most leaders don't realize:
Culture isn't built in the office.
It's built in the micro-interactions people have when nobody’s "performing."

Those hallway chats everyone romanticizes?
The impromptu whiteboard debates?
The random cross-team friendships that quietly move mountains?

You never needed the hallway.
You need spaces where humans show up as humans.

In-office teams get it by accident.
Remote teams get it by design.
And design is almost always stronger than chance.

You have to create digital rooms and hallways where those serendipitous moments can happen.
With intention - not meetings or structured rituals.
Just simple, human spaces where people can show up as themselves.

Here are the Slack channels every fully-remote engineering org should have if you want a vibrant culture:

💬 #watercooler/#random/#social - The mandatory chaos channel

If this isn’t lively, your culture is dehydrated. 
This is where people say good morning, vent lightly, share the random small stuff.

😂 #memes — The universal language of the internet

Humor lowers defenses, accelerates bonding, and sparks shared references. Healthy teams roast responsibly.

🎮 #hobbies — Bikes, cooking, gaming, guitars, gardening

When people learn what their teammates love, trust accelerates.
Hobby channels turn coworkers into people.

📺 #pop-culture — Movies, shows, music, Reels

Teams with shared stories collaborate more easily. Pop culture is modern campfire storytelling.

🚪 #hallway — For the stray thoughts and half-formed ideas

This is where innovation often starts.
Create a space where thinking out loud is normal.

🧠 #bug-writing-garage - "Can I borrow your brain?"

A lightweight spot to ask for quick feedback and sanity checks - because the fastest way to kill a remote team is to make every conversation a meeting.

In conclusion, culture isn’t built on proximity - it’s built on familiarity.
And familiarity scales beautifully online when you design spaces for it deliberately.
Without that, you get a culture based on whoever sits closest to the break room.

📢 Your turn! What channels would you add? What else can you do to support real culture in a remote environment?

👉 Want some help setting the vibe for your remote team? I'm at the center of the culture and technology Venn diagram. DM me. 

♻️ If this landed, pass it along - remote leaders need to hear this.

Want to do something big? 
Then start with something small, and don't stop.

My good friend Michael Carducci is a world-renowned public speaker.

He blends magic and software architecture into talks that both captivate and educate - a combination only he could pull off.

Every year, he invites me to join him on stage.

And every year I give the same excuse:
"I don't think I have anything to say."

But this year, I couldn’t hide behind that excuse anymore…
because it was demonstrably untrue.

That's because I set a simple goal for this year:
Write an original story on LinkedIn every single day.
In my own voice. 
About things I’d lived, learned, messed up, and figured out the hard way.

After my 300th post I realized - maybe I do have something to say.

So when Michael asked again in August, I stepped out in faith and (in my best Hackerman voice) said:
"I’m in."

To prepare I reviewed every post I’d written, sorting them into themes and threads.

As I chained them together into a table of contents, I realized I wasn't writing a presentation from scratch...

I was assembling stories, like modules in an application, and refining them into a coherent narrative. 

Like many ambitious engineers, I tried to make v1.0 too big, too polished, too complete.

So I scoped it back to the topic closest to my heart:
How to see and influence engineering cultures through the eyes of an anthropologist.

Like my friend, I realized I had a unique perspective too.

When I finally delivered the talk, the room was packed.
The applause was thunderous.
And afterward, someone came up to me just to say:
"I feel seen."

That moment will stay with me.

I say all that to say this:

If there's something big you want to do, start with something small every day.

Even if you're unsure of yourself.
Even if you think no one will care.
Even if it scares you.

Because you never know where it will take you.

Multipotentialite Magician & Holistic Software Architect

Wheels up! I'm East bound and down to Clearwater Florida. ✈️

Tomorrow I’m speaking at the Teach Leader Summit about something I’ve spent 20+ years obsessing over:

Engineering culture - how it forms, how it fractures, and how to shape it with intention.

👉 My talk: "An Anthropologist’s Guide to Engineering Cultures."

Drawing from my unusual background as a former anthropologist and a seasoned engineering leader, I’ll be breaking down the practical techniques I’ve used to build high-trust, high-performing teams - plus the stories (and visuals) that bring those lessons to life.

If you’re at the summit, come say hi. 👋

If you’re not, expect a few takeaways here soon.

Clearwater, here I come!

🔗 https://lnkd.in/gpRj2NSk

What's more important for success? Preparation, or adaptability?

I fond out the hard way minutes before my presentation was scheduled to start.

3 months of preparation, 1 hour of speaking, and 5 minutes of absolute terror: The road to Tech Leader Summit.

Apparently, every 30 years or so, whether I need to or not, I give a talk at a conference.

At the last one I was an anthropologist giving a research paper at the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Since then I became a software engineer by necessity, a manager by accident, and eventually an emotionally intelligent leader through years of deliberate study and painful trial-and-error. 

I was thrilled to finally tell the story of how I got from that podium to the next one, and how the lessons I learned along the way could help other software engineers become more effective leaders, faster.

But to do that, I knew I needed to prepare like my career depended on it.

For three months I agonized over every word, image, joke and transition.

I rehearsed my talk at my standing desk, set to the height of a conference podium, to make it as realistic as possible.

With the laptop close to my face, I could easily read my speaker notes. I planned to rely on them heavily.

When I zipped my laptop into my backpack and boarded the plane, I knew I was ready.

Or so I thought.

Generals say no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Mine didn't survive first contact with the conference room.

As I was setting up I realized, to my horror, there was no podium in the room. 😱

Just a speaker's desk - a standard height table. 

With the glasses I brought, there was no way I could read my notes from that distance.

For a moment, panic.
Then instinct.

In any survival situation, step one is to assess your immediate surroundings.

No box.
No crate.
No conveniently podium-shaped object.

But… there were rows of storage drawers built into the wall.

I pulled out two, stacked them on the table to create a makeshift podium, and launched right into my session - on time.

And honestly?
It couldn’t have gone any better.

But next time… yeah, I’m bringing a stand.

So which matters more: preparation or adaptability?
Trick question. 
The leaders who win know you need both.

📢Your turn:
Has preparation or adaptability ever saved you at the last minute?
Drop your story in the comments. I'd love to hear it.

What if the thing your engineering team needs you to notice the most… is something you can’t even see?

I call it Emotional Observability, and it lives in the negative space between the things you can see.

And the key to unlocking it was discovered by astrophysicists over 150 years ago.

Let me explain.

In the 1860s, Kirchhoff and Bunsen made a stunning discovery:
You could determine the composition of distant stars - not by the light they emitted - but by the dark gaps in their spectrum.

All they had to do was pass starlight through a prism.

The prism separated the light into its components… 
and revealed the invisible.
Those missing wavelengths told the whole story. 
Every element absorbs - and hides - a specific wavelength of light.

Engineering teams are no different.

The truths you need most as a leader rarely show up in your dashboards.

They appear in the subtle, easily-missed "absorption lines" of team behavior:
🔭 the hesitation after a question…
🔭 the idea that dies in someone’s throat…
🔭 the energy shift in a meeting…
🔭 the risk no one wants to be the first to raise

So what’s the equivalent of a prism for emotional observability?

It’s the set of practices that refract your team’s experience into something you can actually read:

📡 Consistent 1:1s that go beyond status
📡 Psychological safety check-ins
📡 Asking engineers how they’re feeling, not just what they’re doing
📡 Watching energy, not just output
📡 Creating space where people tell you the truth early - while you can still act on it

These are the lenses that separate the "white light" of day-to-day execution into the emotional spectrum beneath it.

When you learn to read that spectrum, your leadership shifts:
Problems stop blindsiding you.
Trust becomes measurable.
Culture becomes something you shape - intentionally, not reactively.

Because great engineering cultures aren’t built on what you can see.
They’re built on your ability to detect what’s missing…
and the prism you choose to reveal it.

📣 Are you ready to see the invisible signals most leaders miss? 
DM me - I coach engineering leaders who want to read their teams as clearly as astronomers read the stars.

♻️ Did you find this useful? Repost to share with your network.

Is invisible rot quietly killing your engineering team?

Last month, a 50-foot pine tree in my backyard died almost overnight.
On Monday it looked strong, straight, and thriving.
By Friday it was deader than fried chicken.

The cause?
Pine beetles.

A rot I couldn’t see until the damage was irreversible.
But the subtle evidence was there, if only I had known what to look for.

As I stood there staring at that tree, it hit me:
This is exactly how software engineering teams fail.

On the outside, everything can look great:
✅ Product shipping
✅ Sprints completing
✅ Metrics trending "green"
✅ Leadership celebrating "results"

But inside?
They might already be infested. 🪲

Teams rot from within when:
☣️ A toxic high-performer is protected because they "deliver"
☣️ Leaders optimize for vanity metrics instead of human ones
☣️ Psychological safety erodes one small incident at a time
☣️ People stop speaking up

Everything looks fine… until one day it just falls over.
By the time you finally see the problem, it’s too late.

Healthy cultures rarely explode.
They quietly decay.
And the decay always starts where leaders aren’t looking.

If you’re a senior engineering leader or executive, ask yourself:
"When’s the last time I checked for the rot I can’t see?"

Not the dashboards.
Not the velocity charts.
Not the OKRs.

The people.

Because high-performance cultures aren’t built on speed.
They’re built on emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and leaders who are willing to address what others avoid.

💬 What’s the "hidden rot" you’ve seen destroy high-performing teams?

👉 Need an engineering culture arborist to check on your team's health? DM me.

Speed gets all the attention. But in leadership, steadiness is what actually saves people from crashing. 🌊

Last week, I climbed the 88 steps of the 175-year-old Key West Lighthouse. 

At the top, wind in my face and the sea stretching endlessly in every direction, I felt something click.

Leadership, I realized, is a lot like a lighthouse.

Not flashy. Not fast. But steady. Anchored. Built to last.

A lighthouse doesn’t chase ships. It doesn’t bark orders. It simply stands, casting light across the dark, helping others navigate treacherous waters. It says: “Here’s where the rocks are. Here’s the safe passage. I’ve got you.”

But what really struck me was the Fresnel lens - a marvel of 19th-century engineering. It takes scattered rays of light, traveling in every direction, and bends them into a single, focused beam that can reach for miles.

That’s leadership too.

We’re surrounded by scattered energy... ideas, emotions, talents, tensions. A good leader doesn’t try to do it all. They focus. They align. They take the raw light of a team’s potential and shape it into something powerful, something that cuts through fog and guides the way forward.

And like the keepers who climbed those stairs every day to tend the flame, leadership isn’t glamorous. It’s daily. It’s deliberate. It’s about showing up, even in storms.

So here’s to the quiet leaders. The ones who don’t need a spotlight because they are the light. The ones who help others steer clear of the rocks - not by shouting, but by shining.

𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗱𝗼.

They negotiate down.

When you put a team together - especially distributed engineering teams - you’re connecting people with different cultures of origin.

Different communication norms.
Different risk thresholds.
Different instincts about when to challenge, when to comply, and when to stay quiet.

What happens next is predictable.

Just like HDMI, modems, or network links, the team goes through an unspoken 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗰𝗼𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝗴𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

Everyone is scanning for:

🛜 What’s safe to say here?
🛜 What gets rewarded?
🛜 What quietly gets punished?

And without intervention, the system converges on the 𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿.

The safest language.
The least controversial ideas.
The smallest possible signal.

That’s a mistake.

Healthy cultures don’t optimize for compatibility.
They optimize for 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘄𝗶𝗱𝘁𝗵.

High-performing teams don’t ask:
“What do we all agree on?”

They ask:
“What unique signal does each person bring - and how do we amplify it?”

Here’s the part leaders often miss:

If you don’t actively 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗰𝗼𝗹, the team will automatically 𝘀𝗵𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝘁.

Shrinking isn’t being inclusive.
It’s compression.
And compression always loses information.

If you want better decisions, faster learning, and fewer late-stage surprises, don’t negotiate your culture down.

Upgrade the protocol.

👉 If this resonates, this is the work I do.
I help engineering leaders expand their team’s "protocol" - so more signal makes it through.
DM me if you want to talk.

“Any questions?” is killing your meetings.

It sounds harmless. Teams hear it as: stay quiet… 𝘰𝘳 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦.

High‑performance cultures - whether in engineering, product, or ops - aren’t built on silence. They’re built on curiosity, psychological safety, and leaders who know how to unlock dialogue.

𝗧𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱:

👂 Ask for perspectives: "What concern might I be missing?"
📖 Invite stories: "Has anyone faced this before?"
📡 Signal openness: "If you were designing this, what would you do differently?"

These questions shift passive compliance → active engagement. They tell your team: your voice matters. Truth-telling isn’t dangerous - it’s expected.

After 20+ years in engineering leadership (and with a background in psychology & anthropology), I’ve learned:
Meetings end better when they start 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡 conversations, not suppress them.

Teams that feel safe move faster, think sharper, and solve problems you didn’t even see coming.

That’s the ROI of psychological safety.

If you’re a CEO, CTO, or VP of Engineering, ask yourself:
Are you building a culture of compliance, or a culture of conversation?

👉 Ready to lead with 𝗽𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗮𝗳𝗲𝘁𝘆 + 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲? That’s exactly what I coach leaders to do.

📢Leaders - what's one tactic you use to make your team feel safe speaking up?

Most leaders don’t fail from lack of effort... they fail because they never step somewhere quiet enough to notice they’re off-course.

There’s a “secret deck” on many cruise ships.
Not on any map. No signs. No instructions.

But if you know where to look, you can find it: a dark, empty stretch of forward deck - quiet, wind-swept, and completely disconnected from the noise of the ship.

I try to visit it every time we sail. Especially at night. It’s one of the few places where you can hear nothing but the ocean and your own thoughts.

On our last night at sea, I climbed the stairs, slipped through the interior door, and grabbed the exterior latch.

The moment I opened it, a wall of wind tore me out of the hallway and sent me tumbling across the deck. 

Maybe there's a reason they don't advertise it. 🤷

As I got up I noticed something I’d never seen before:
an analog compass mounted discreetly in the shadows, quietly tracking our heading.

It struck me how easy it is - in work, in life, even on a vacation cruise - to get swept up in motion, noise, and momentum.

But leaders don’t just move. Leaders steer.

And sometimes the most important thing you can do is step away from the crowd, find a quiet place, and check your own internal compass.

When was the last time you paused long enough to make sure you're still headed where you actually want to go?

📣 Have you followed a leader who didn't check their compass enough? Or one who saved the day by checking it? I'd love to hear the story.

👉 Need help navigating leadership? DM me!

Great engineering teams don’t run on urgency.
They run on trust.

I think of the relationship between a leader and their team like a ledger.
Every interaction is either a deposit or a withdrawal.

Most leaders don’t fail because they ask for too much.
They fail because they ask before they’ve earned the balance.

In software engineering, moments of real urgency will happen.
💸 A production incident.
💸 A late-breaking requirement.
💸 A launch-week surprise.
The moments where you have to ask people to go above and beyond.

But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough:

If you haven’t been making steady deposits...
🏦 listening with patience,
🏦 protecting your team’s focus,
🏦 giving credit generously,
🏦 sharing context early,
🏦 clearing roadblocks,
🏦 treating people like humans instead of resources

…then the day you need your team the most, you’ll discover the account is overdrawn.

When I ask my team to stretch, I want them to say "yes" because they trust me, not because they’re afraid to say no.

So I try to invest long before I need anything back.
I aim to show up with consistency, clarity, and empathy.
I try to make emotional deposits in the quiet, ordinary moments...
because that’s what gives me the grace to make a withdrawal when it really matters.

Leadership isn’t the ability to demand more.
It’s the responsibility to earn the right to ask.

👉 Want some help auditing your trust ledger? DM me, or book a free consultation at coded2lead.com.

The biggest outage in your org isn’t in production.
It’s in the room you’re leading.

Most engineering leaders obsess over system observability - dashboards, logs, error rates, KPIs, SLOs.

And yet…

Some of the most catastrophic team failures I’ve seen weren’t caused by bad code or architecture.

They were caused by leaders who couldn’t see emotional drift.

Not because they didn’t care.
Because they had no telemetry.

By the time the behavior became unmissable, the damage was already baked in.

Here’s the emotional observability I teach leaders to watch for:

📡 Sudden silence
📡 Reduced engagement
📡 Compliance without contribution
📡 People no longer escalating small issues
📡 That subtle energy shift you can’t quantify, but can absolutely feel

These are the early-warning signals of burnout, disconnection, or loss of trust.

Tech leaders love to say, "We’re data-driven."

But if you’re not gathering and monitoring the human data of your team, you’re missing the most critical part of the system you’re responsible for.

Teams don’t fail at the moment they break.
They fail at the moment you stopped noticing.

📣 What emotional signal have you learned to catch early in your team? 
Drop it in the comments. 
Your insight might help another leader catch something in time.

To all who celebrate, from my family to yours, have a very happy Thanksgiving!

I'm grateful for the real connections I've made here ❤️

Friday Fun - the Legacy Repo Scavenger Hunt 🧭🗺️🪙

Last week at Tech Leader Summit, Erica Woods ran an excellent session on teambuilding - and challenged us to come up with ideas for our own teams.

I wrote down "scavenger hunt", and the wheels started turning... how could I pull this off with a remote team?

As I pondered how to have an adventure without leaving the house, it came to me:

What's the scariest, most haunted place a remote engineering team can go?

🕯️𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 💀

So here's your list of forgotten treasures - and cursed relics - to hunt for in the dusty corners of that forgotten repo.

See how many you and your team can find...if you dare.

🪙 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗢𝗗𝗢 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗮𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗢-𝗗𝗢𝗡𝗘
Find the oldest comment that says // 𝚃𝙾𝙳𝙾: 𝚏𝚒𝚡... but no one ever did.

🧛 𝗩𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 
They're called by everything, return nothing useful, and cannot be deleted. They feed on your runtime.

🧟 𝗭𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗶𝗲 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗙𝗹𝗮𝗴𝘀
Still in the codebase. No longer used. No one remembers what it did. It just… lingers.

🧙‍♀️ 𝗦𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗲𝘅 
A 3-line regular expression that parses 12 edge cases and 0 human souls. Bonus points if it’s undocumented.

🪦 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘆𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗱-𝗢𝘂𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲 
A whole file’s worth of code, commented out like a tomb. Who buried it? Why? No one knows.

🧵 𝗣𝗥 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗲 
A 40-comment pull request debate about tabs vs spaces, or mutating variables. The wounds are still fresh.

🧓 𝗘𝗹𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 
A package that hasn’t been updated in a decade or more. Still works. No one dares touch it.

🧞 𝗠𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗡𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 
A hardcoded value with no explanation. Changing it breaks everything. Leaving it feels wrong.

🧑‍🚀 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲-𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗔𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗹𝘆 
A function that uses both UTC and local time… and sometimes EST. It breaks during daylight savings.

🏴‍☠️ 𝗣𝗶𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲’𝘀 𝗟𝗼𝗴 
A commit message that just says "fixes." No ticket. No context. Just vibes.

A hunt like this reminds the whole team that a codebase isn’t just code - it’s a trail of choices, near-misses, brilliant saves, and the kinds of stories teams carry for years... or shared trauma bonding.

Like following an old map in the attic, the real treasure might just be the engineering folklore you uncover along the way.

What treasures do you think your team will find?

I’ve waited more than 20 years to tell this story.

How a troubled young man found refuge in a Commodore 64 and accidentally became a child-prodigy programmer.

...then lost the thread, walked away from it all, and became an archaeologist instead.

How he eventually came full circle and returned to programming as an adult.

...only to become an accidental manager, and - after painful failures and years of deliberate effort - an emotionally intelligent leader.

And how he came full circle again, weaving anthropology and computer science into a unique framework for building high-performing engineering cultures.

Today, I finally get to tell the whole story.

At 4:00 PM, I’ll be sharing it during my talk at the Tech Leader Summit:

"An Anthropologist’s Guide to Engineering Cultures."

I can’t wait.

Here’s a sneak peek from my slide deck. 

I hope to see you there!

Weekend watch list 🎥
Is science fiction how we rehearse the future? Do we still need humans in the loop with the rise of AI and agentic systems?

If you're interested in either of those questions, Michael Carducci has the video for you. If you're looking for something to watch this weekend, it is well worth your time.

Not long ago, I released what might be the most ambitious video we’ve ever made… and almost nobody has seen it yet.

Honestly? That stings a little.

But I’m posting this because I believe the story we told deserves a chance to find the people who would love it... people like you.

This episode is part Cold War thriller, part tech history, part meditation on why humans still matter in the age of automation. And it’s probably the most “us” video we’ve ever made... equal parts engineering, philosophy, humor, and genuine wonder (combined with producer Kate’s flawless vision style and production quality). A fascinating tale, but perhaps a little too layered for the algorithm to figure out who to show it to yet... But we don't create for the algorithm, we create for humans.

It started with a simple idea - that we are living in the future and facing tough decisions. But we have an interesting lens to explore though: science fiction is how we rehearse the future.

Sometimes as a promise, sometimes as a warning… and sometimes because reality is already stranger (and scarier) than the movies.

A lot of you will remember WarGames as an ’80s classic. What most people don’t know is that one of its most terrifying scenes actually happened in real life--four years before the film came out.

A NORAD computer suddenly reported 1,400 incoming Soviet missiles.
For six full minutes, the world stood one bad decision away from ending itself.

And what saved us wasn’t a supercomputer or an automated defense system.

It was a human being willing to say, “This doesn’t make sense.”

That choice — to pause, to question, to stay in the loop — changed history.
We live in a world now where everyone carries a supercomputer in their pocket, where AI systems can write, draw, persuade, and increasingly decide. The temptation to outsource judgment is stronger than ever.
But the lesson hasn’t changed:

Technology should augment our humanity, not replace it.

If you have ~20 minutes and enjoy stories that sit at the intersection of tech, humanity, and “wait, that actually happened?!”, I’d love for you to watch it.

➡️ “WarGames Wasn’t Fiction — and Why It Matters More Than Ever”
https://lnkd.in/gXngHUKR

If it resonates, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on YouTube.

And if it doesn’t… well, that’s useful feedback too.

Thanks for reading. It means more than you know.

-Michael

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