ONE Discovery Inc.

I’ve had the privilege of leading engineering efforts to redefine what’s possible in the eDiscovery space. My mission is to merge innovation with collaboration, delivering high-impact solutions that drive both technical and business excellence.

One of my proudest achievements is spearheading the development of a cutting-edge Information Governance product capable of inventorying and searching unstructured enterprise data at petabyte scale. 

Built on a distributed microservices architecture, this transformative product progressed from concept to MVP in just 3 months, all thanks to a lean and highly focused team of three engineers.

Throughout my tenure, I’ve prioritized building and nurturing high-performing teams. Leading 3 engineering teams and a QA team across onshore, offshore, and remote environments, I’ve fostered a culture rooted in trust, growth, and innovation. 

This approach has not only unified diverse teams but has also led to tangible results: a 33% reduction in bug creation rates and a dramatic acceleration of flagship product release cycles—from 7 months to just 2 weeks.

What sets our engineering culture apart is its people-first focus. I’ve worked hard to create a supportive, growth-oriented environment where top technical talent thrives. 

Combining this ethos with a forward-looking approach to technology has enabled me to drive the strategic evaluation and integration of emerging technologies, ensuring our offerings remain ahead of the curve in a competitive market.

Collaboration with product management, executives, and stakeholders has reinforced my belief that great technology is built on trust, teamwork, and a relentless drive to innovate.

Innovation doesn’t happen in silos—it requires a balance of technical expertise, empathetic leadership, and a shared purpose. 

At ONE Discovery, I’m proud to play a part in creating scalable solutions, enabling exceptional teams, and driving meaningful impact for our customers.

Vice President of Engineering

Driven, Inc.

As Director of Research and Development at Driven Inc., I was brought on to revitalize the R&D department for this $20M national provider of legal services. 

My mission was to drive innovation, operational excellence, and cutting-edge product development in alignment with strategic business objectives.

One of my defining achievements was leading the design, planning, and development of a groundbreaking SaaS product for a major credit card company. 

Starting from concept, I delivered a fully functional 1.0 public release in under 6 months. This was achieved by leveraging agile methodologies and working with a lean team of just 2 engineers—a testament to the team’s focus, collaboration, and technical expertise.

Close collaboration with executives, subject matter experts, and client stakeholders was at the core of this role. 

Together, we crafted detailed project plans, schedules, and roadmaps, ensuring alignment with both client needs and company goals. Monthly product updates were released rapidly, integrating customer feedback to achieve product maturity and consistently high user satisfaction.

In this role, I championed the integration of innovative technologies into the R&D process, significantly enhancing team productivity and unlocking advanced product capabilities. 

By fostering a collaborative culture of open communication among R&D staff, I ensured seamless teamwork on complex projects and cross-departmental initiatives. This approach not only empowered my teams but also accelerated the delivery of impactful solutions for our clients.

This position was a showcase of my ability to lead lean teams, adapt to fast-paced environments, and transform innovative concepts into tangible products that drive value and exceed expectations.

Director of Research and Development

Omnivere

Joining this $100M legal service provider specializing in eDiscovery, forensics, staffing, managed review, and consulting was an opportunity to redefine IT strategy and align technology with business growth. 

Partnering with the CEO and executive team, I spearheaded initiatives to modernize infrastructure, consolidate systems, and ensure operational resilience, all while fostering collaboration across departments.

One of my key focuses was building a high-performing IT team. I coached and managed a talented group of 14 infrastructure and software development specialists, including remote teleworkers, creating a culture of trust, innovation, and excellence. 

Together, we supported the technical needs of 200 internal and 600 external users across 5 business units, 6 offices, and 4 data centers.

Leveraging a $1.5M budget, I developed a comprehensive technology roadmap that prioritized business continuity, disaster recovery, and infrastructure modernization. 

This included leading change management and business continuity committees and overseeing the planning, design, and execution of disaster recovery initiatives across physical and cloud-based systems.

Ensuring security and compliance was a cornerstone of my role. By maintaining ISO 27001 certification and enforcing robust information security policies, I elevated the company’s reputation for reliability and risk management. 

My collaboration with finance, sales, and marketing departments ensured technology investments aligned with broader business goals, including training sales teams on the company’s unique technology capabilities to enhance client engagement.

This role exemplified my ability to merge strategic IT leadership with operational execution, driving innovation while ensuring the seamless delivery of services to clients and internal stakeholders.

Chief Information Officer

Kiersted Systems

As Vice President of Technology, I had the privilege of shaping the technology strategy for a $12M eDiscovery and legal technology leader, driving innovation and aligning IT initiatives with the company’s business goals. 

This role allowed me to lead transformative projects that strengthened operational efficiency and empowered teams to deliver exceptional results.

One of the most rewarding aspects of my leadership was building and mentoring high-performing technology teams. 

By prioritizing effective recruitment, hands-on training, and strategic performance management, I cultivated a culture of collaboration and innovation that consistently exceeded expectations. 

This approach enabled the company to scale rapidly, achieving a 15x increase in core business service capacity and driving 12x revenue growth through the modernization of application development with Agile, DevOps, and n-tier methodologies.

Guiding the company through complex technology migrations was another defining element of my tenure. 

By implementing streamlined processes, I ensured minimal disruption to end-users while significantly enhancing system stability and performance. 

Alongside these initiatives, I led the charge to achieve ISO 27001 certification within 12 months—establishing the company’s first formal security framework and elevating compliance standards.

Operational excellence was a cornerstone of my strategy. 

Through proactive maintenance and streamlined technical operations, I maintained 99.97% system uptime, ensuring seamless service delivery and reinforcing the company's reputation for reliability.

This role showcased my ability to lead with both technical precision and a people-first mindset, ensuring technology and strategy worked in harmony to drive exceptional outcomes.

Vice President, Technology

👋 I’ve blended the art of executive leadership with the science of software engineering, transforming teams and organizations into innovation powerhouses. 

My passion lies at the intersection of technology and people, where I thrive on creating environments where engineers feel empowered, collaboration flourishes, and business goals are consistently exceeded.

→ Throughout my career, I’ve earned a reputation for turning small, diverse teams into high-performing units capable of tackling the most ambitious challenges. 

Whether leading global, cross-functional groups or working hands-on with engineers, I’ve always believed the best solutions come from fostering trust, open communication, and shared purpose.

→ As Vice President of Engineering at ONE Discovery, I led the creation of an Information Governance product capable of searching unstructured data at petabyte scale. 

Built on a distributed microservices architecture, this groundbreaking product went from concept to MVP in just 3 months with a lean team of 3 engineers. I also spearheaded institutional changes that reduced bug creation rates by 33% and transformed release cycles from 7 months to 2 weeks.

→ Before that, as Director of Research and Development at Driven Inc., I guided the design and implementation of a SaaS product for a major credit card company, achieving a functional public release in under 6 months. 

Leveraging agile methodologies, I ensured incremental updates were closely aligned with user feedback, enhancing customer satisfaction and delivery speed.

→ Across roles, I’ve built and scaled teams spanning onshore, offshore, remote, and in-office environments, successfully navigating cultural and operational differences. 

I specialize in aligning enterprise-wide technology strategies with business objectives, driving digital transformation, and delivering scalable solutions that ensure long-term impact. 

→ What drives me is the belief that great technology stems from great teams. My leadership philosophy focuses on fostering trust, collaboration, and ingenuity, ensuring teams are empowered to bring their best ideas forward. 

My approach balances data-driven decision-making with a people-first mindset, enabling sustainable growth and impactful results.

Technology evolves rapidly, but the heart of innovation will always be people—the driving force behind every breakthrough.

If you’re interested in learning more about my leadership approach or expertise, let’s connect and explore opportunities to collaborate.

☕ Book A Coffee With Me: https://calendly.com/robertnharris

Leadership lessons - you're never too important to serve or clean.

I'll never forget the day I was mopping the showroom floor at the motorcycle shop where I worked through college. 

I saw a couple walk into the showroom so I put down the mop, greeted them, and asked how I could help.

"Can we talk to a salesperson?" they asked.

"You're talking to him now!" I smiled back. 

Their expression of disapproval said it all, but in case there was any doubt they added "Are you sure? You look more like the janitor."

I kept smiling, and eventually got them what they were looking for, but I was secretly glad when they left. 

Despite the awkwardness of that moment, I was undeterred in my "no job too small" philosophy.

That showroom floor was my cathedral. I took great pride in making it shine. If the bathroom was dirty, I cleaned that too. 

It's a philosophy I've carried through all my careers since then.

Back in the physical office days, I made the first pot of coffee every morning. 

When our infrastructure team had to pull an all-nighter to recover from a freak hardware and power failure, I kept them supplied with food and energy drinks. 

I say all that to say this:

Treat the janitor with the same respect as you would the CEO. 

For all you know, they might be the same person. 

Have you ever witnessed an unusual act of service from someone at the top of the org chart?

Have you ever performed one yourself?

Robert N. Harris

Leading Software Engineering With Grace: Who Says You Can't Code and Communicate | Driving Innovation With Emotionally Intelligent Leadership | Let's Engineer Success Together

Friday Fun - what if software engineers could earn merit badges?

If you've ever been a scout, you know nothing beats the feeling of adding a new achievement to your uniform. 

Here are the badges I would have my local developer troop working towards:

🎖️ Code Archaeologist - For deciphering ancient legacy code and surviving to tell the tale.

🎖️ Rubber Duck Debugger - Because it helps to talk to someone about your problems, even if they're a plastic toy.

🎖️ Bug Whisperer - For squashing a gnarly bug that’s haunted the team for weeks.

🎖️ Container Commander - For mastering Docker and Kubernetes like a digital admiral.

🎖️ Pull Request Paladin - Because giving thoughtful, kind, and constructive code reviews secures your alignment as Lawful Good.

Which ones would you add? Drop them in the comments!

📷 Bonus pic of my boys getting kitted up for their scouts journey many years ago.

If you don't schedule downtime for your systems, your systems will schedule downtime for you...especially the human systems. 

It's Labor Day in the United States.

In modern times it's easy to think of it as just a three day weekend, an opportunity to cook out or enjoy a road trip with the family. 

Those are good things and I enjoy them as much as the next person, but there is a deeper meaning to the holiday.

First celebrated in 1882, it was a symbolic win for the labor movement; a chance to reflect on the dignity of work and the hard-fought battle for shorter hours, safer conditions, and fair wages.

So today I'm going to honor that tradition by giving myself permission to pause, to rest with intention.

And to grill some killer hamburgers, of course. 

I hope you'll do the same. 

Happy Labor Day everyone.

You never know who you're going to meet at Cup of Joey.

But you'll always be glad you met them. 

CoJ and the Houston Regional Veterans Chamber of Commerce come together to put on a networking event like no other in Houston.

Held in the evening on the second Tuesday of every month, the causal atmosphere inside Pinstripes makes mingling as easy as having a beer and a pizza...which is exactly what I did. 

Did I mention they have a full service bar and restaurant?

I started the night talking to a spirits entrepreneur launching the first rum that's made in Texas, and ended it having a fascinating conversation with a spacesuit engineer about technology, innovation, and leadership. 

How cool is that?

𝘊𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 😎 

It's the best place in Houston to network and support veteran-owned businesses. 

📷 Hanging out with my new friend Julie N Strickland, PMP 🍓 and the mayor of Houston networking Adrian Leal 🍔

Cup of Joey

Houston Regional Veterans Chamber of Commerce

Pinstripes

Entrepreneur, Project Manager, Spacesuit Engineer

PCBA Manufacturing SME providing Texas Ingenuity + European Innovation to the USA Market

Software engineers obsess over tools, but we often neglect the one that supports us most. Your chair isn’t just furniture, it’s your foundation.

Here’s how mine saved my spine, and my focus.

When I got my first real programming job in the early 2000s, my monitor was a 17" CRT that was so heavy it bent my cheap card table desk into a perfect parabola.

It was suboptimal to say the least. 

A few years later when I was promoted to Manager of Development, I got a proper desk and my choice of accessories to finish it out.

🖥️ Triple monitors? The bare minimum if you ask me!

⌨️ Kinesis freestyle split keyboard that adjusted in pitch, roll, and yaw? Once you have one there's no going back!

🎧 Bose QuietComfort noise cancelling headphones - is there any other way to get deep focus work done?

Those were tremendous boons for my comfort and productivity.

But they weren't the most important one. 

Than honor goes to....my desk chair.

I was very unkind to my back in my teens and twenties. 

As an aspiring motocross racer, I was just as likely to leave the track on a stretcher as I was with a trophy. 🚑 

A herniated disc here, a whiplash injury there... after a while it starts to add up. 😅 

The cheap, generic chairs my company issued were torture devices for me.

I found an ancient, gaudy red velour high-backed chair in a forgotten storage room, and claimed it.

It was as outrageously comfortable as it was ugly and unsafe; it had a 3 pedestal base that wouldn't pass any modern safety regulations. It would tip over with me in it at the least provocation, which it did several times. 

After I'd broken off both of the chair's arms the founder sent me to the Steelcase store with the company AMEX. 

I came back with...a chair that has served me well for the last 20 years. 

As a software engineer, you're going to spend a LOT of time sitting in front of a computer.

The quality and comfort of your chair makes a huge impact on your productivity. 

Insist on one that helps you perform at your best. 

What piece of equipment has the biggest impact on your productivity?

📷 "The Big Chair" as my boss called it, and the reason I needed it.

Self-Service Sunday - the beauty and the horror of being tech support for the entire family.

Being a technical problem solver is so deeply ingrained into my identity, I wouldn't recognize myself without that ability.

Part of it is hereditary; I came from a long line of tinkerers.

Much of it was born of necessity; growing up my family couldn't afford to hire mechanics, plumbers, or electricians as a general rule.

Solving my own problems with whatever tools and supplies I could scrape together was a survival skill.

It's served me very well, professionally and personally, and led to a tremendously successful and enjoyable career.

But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. 

Some people get by with a little help from their friends. 

More often than not, 𝘐 𝘢𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥.

I love being helpful, and helping others...but sometimes it can get overwhelming.

I've been swamped with hardware support issues lately, and I'm in danger of losing my implacable calm.

In the last week I've had to deal with:

🚱 Water dripping from the ceiling. That's probably not supposed to happen.

💽 The man who taught me how to swap out a motherboard needs help with a factory reset on his latest ill-advised purchase.

🚪 The backyard gate doesn't close anymore. I discovered this when I let the dog out and saw her running down the street moments later.

💣 And for the coup de grâce, my daughter's car came home on a tow truck at 3 AM, looking like a grenade went off in the driver's front wheel well.

And yet, despite the chaos, I wouldn’t trade it.

Because buried beneath the leaks, the locked-out laptops, the runaway dogs, and the midnight tow trucks… is something far more valuable than peace and quiet.

It’s trust.

It’s the quiet confidence in my daughter’s voice when she calls, knowing I’ll pick up.

It’s the look on my dad’s face when I fix something he thought was beyond repair.

It’s the gratitude of a family that knows, no matter what breaks, I’ll find a way to make it work.

Service isn’t just about tech support. It’s about being the person people turn to when things fall apart.

And sure, sometimes I wish my family didn't come to me with every...single...problem.

But then I remember: this is the life I built. One solved problem at a time.

So I take a breath. I grab my toolkit. And I whisper the sacred incantation of every seasoned fixer:

"𝙇𝙚𝙩’𝙨 𝙨𝙚𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙚’𝙧𝙚 𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝."

📷 "I have no idea what happened dad." 🤦‍♂️

Do you want to know if AI is magic? ✨ 

I asked actual magician and holistic software architect Michael Carducci to find out. 

He recently gave a riveting talk on the subject for the Houston Java User Group, hosted by Improving.

In it he drew a straight line from Alan Turing's groundbreaking research in 1949 on the "Imitation Game", now known as the Turing Test, to the latest advances (and manifest challenges) with LLMs, Agentic AI, and RAG.

Spoiler alert: They're not magic, they're math, but they can be very convincing. 

Anyone considering integrating AI into their enterprise would do well to heed his cautionary tales, and maybe pick up a copy of his book Mastering Software Architecture, because the consistent theme of the presentation was this:

If you think you can just plug AI into your existing business processes, architecture, and information silos, you're going to have a bad time. 

If that's where you're at on your AI journey right now, how's it going? What's working for you? What's the biggest challenge?

Multipotentialite Magician & Holistic Software Architect

Houston Java User Group

Improving

Do perfect software requirements exist?

If they do, I've never seen them.

If they did, I think they would be a waste. 

Let me explain why.

An entire ecosystem of books, training, consultants, and companies have sprung up around the problem of creating high-quality, actionable software requirements. 

I think they're missing the point, or at least half of it.

Of course requirements need to be as unambiguous and thorough as possible. 

The catch with that is, just like any other part of the software engineering ecosystem, documenting and generating those requirements costs money too.

How good is good enough?

Here's my formula for answering that:

The amount of depth and detail needed is inversely proportional to how well your team has internalized the product's mission. 

That's the missing half - how well the team is able to fill in the gaps.

Do your requirements have to be so long and detailed that the source code to implement them would probably be shorter?

Either you're working with a team that knows very little about what they're building, or you have trust issues. 

Do most of your Jira tickets have a blank description?

Either you've achieved telepathic levels of alignment with the developers, or you love logging bugs and paying for rework. 

The only way to know where your organization should be on that spectrum is to truly know your team, and how well they know what the product is supposed to do. 

Otherwise, you're wasting money at either end of the requirements spectrum.

Shoutout to Jim Cakalic for the comment that inspired this post. 

👋 I'm Robert. I help engineering teams find the right balance so they can move quickly without breaking the bank.

📷 I'm sure I'll burn for this one 😅

Senior Software Engineer/Architect

Networking after dark 🌃 - getting SaaS-y edition.  

I was honored to be invited to the inaugural SaaS Brass networking event in Houston last Wednesday.

Moksh Shah put together an intimate gathering of tech founders with early stage startups, and a supporting cast of technical leaders from various industries. 

Sponsored by DuploCloud and held in the luxurious Four Seasons in downtown Houston, it was the perfect mix for an unforgettable night of making connections, sharing stories, and enjoying fellowship with like-minded entrepreneurs. 

The vibe was low key and comfortable. More like friends having conversation over cocktails than pitching and striving. The food, drinks, and Top Golf bays were a bonus!

I don't know when the next one will be, or how to get invited, but if you get the chance this event is not to be missed!

📷 Hanging out with my new friends James Voytek and Dhini Nasution, MD, MAP, and a whole room full of inspiring people.

SaaS Brass

Making DevOps simple

DuploCloud

Founder @ Simulos, the flight simulator for B2B jobs.

Your friendly physician who understands AI | Innovator

Sunday reflections - what do your hobbies say about you as a leader?

On the surface, mine say I'm a paradox.

From my early childhood to today, I've had three primary hobbies:

🏎️ Motorsports.

🔭 Astronomy.

🌱 Gardening.

At first glance they're about as different as they can be.

I once had a new neighbor complain about my loud motorcycle. They were surprised when I invited them to get a close look at Saturn later that night. 🪐 

They thought I was a thug, but I'm really just a polymath with a wild streak.

Here's the common theme.

Two of my hobbies are about pushing boundaries.

Behind the wheel of a race car, I'm pushing the limits of physics and my mental and physical abilities.

At the eyepiece of my telescope, I'm exploring the farthest edges of the visible universe.

The third hobby is about nurturing.

Sowing seeds with preparation and care, guiding them as they grow, protecting them from harm.

I blend those three instincts seamlessly into my software engineering leadership style. 

We are going to go 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵, pushing the limits of humans and technology.

We're going to go 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, visiting furthest reaches of engineering practice and philosophy. Some old, some new. 

But through it all, I'm going to be supporting you and your growth the whole way. I'll make sure you don't get hurt or get lost. 

Maybe I'm not a paradox after all. 

How are your leadership traits reflected in or shaped by your hobbies?

Friday Follies - bracing for impact. 🔥 

What do you do when you know there's nothing else you can do?

It was a beautiful day at the racetrack, and I was having a great time with my favorite driving school.

...until the Mustang I was chasing picked up a traffic cone in turn 2, and spit it out right in front of me at the end of the fastest and most dangerous straight on the track. 

Approaching the braking zone at 100 MPH, I didn't like any of my options.

😨 If I stomped on the brakes, the car I just passed would hit me.

😨 To the left, slick grass and a deep drainage culvert. 

😨 To the right, open track but a good chance of losing control while braking for the tight right-hander coming up.

I accepted my fate, loosened my grip, and hit it head-on. 

In the mirrors I saw a cloud of orange plastic confetti fly out from underneath my car. 

Back in the pits the damage didn't look too bad, but I knew there was more to see when I started to hear broken bits of plastic rattling around in the radiator fan. 

A teardown in the garage revealed the true extent of the damage - cracked bumper, broken radiator shroud, and shattered bits of plastic everywhere.

"That's racing" I said to myself, and started patching things up. It could have been worse.

It got me thinking about other areas of my life where I had to face an unpleasant outcome with no power to change it.

Every leader faces situations like this, when the die is cast and all you can do is await the inevitable.

😔 When the star employee quits, and there's no getting them back.

😔 When the startup is out of runway, and there's no way that plane is getting off the ground.

😔 When the product utterly fails in the marketplace.

😔 When the new owners don't have a place for you after the acquisition. 

These moments, and how you handle them, reveal the true character of a leader. 

I do my best to keep my head up, look out for the people around me, mitigate the damage, and walk away with my dignity.

As a leader, have you ever had to confront an impossible situation that was out of your control?

How did you handle it?

What did it teach you about yourself?

Christine Ting is doing an amazing job building a top tier, people-first software engineering organization at Atini Studio Inc.

This kind of leadership is why.

There’s a lie we were sold:
That burnout is the cost of brilliance.
That hustle is the badge of honor.
That rest is only earned after you’ve run yourself into the ground.

As a founder, I fell for it too.
I skipped breaks.
Worked through weekends.
Called 2am "flow state" when it was really just survival.

Here’s the truth I had to unlearn:
𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝘄𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘀𝗱𝗼𝗺.


Some of my boldest ideas?
They didn’t show up during a 12-hour workday.
They came during stillness.
On a walk. In the shower. After I stopped trying so hard.
You can’t force brilliance from an exhausted mind.
You can’t innovate when you’re in survival mode.

So here’s the mindset shift I’ve made—and teach at Atini Studio Inc.:
𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗽𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗮 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲.
It’s where clarity lives.
It’s where your brain connects the dots.
It’s how your team learns that sustainability is strategy.

No more glorifying exhaustion.
Normalize boundaries. Prioritize presence. Protect your brain space.

Because the most creative leaders I know?
➟ Don’t just make time to rest.
➟ They design systems around it.

They understand:
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲.
Don’t spend it to prove a point. Invest it to build a legacy.

When was the last time you truly rested—without guilt?
Tell me how you recharge.
Your rhythm might inspire someone else’s revolution.

#RestIsRadical #CreativeLeadership #AtiniStudio #LeadWithIntention #DesignYourEnergy #WomenWhoBuild #FoundersWithVision

Confessions of a reformed rock star, or how to lose a Fortune 100 client because of a typo. 🎸 

It still pains me to think about it. 

I wasn't the stereotypical rock star...I wasn't a diva. I never trashed a hotel room, never maxed out the company credit card at the bar.

Think more Sammy Hagar than David Lee Roth, or Dave Grohl than Kurt Cobain. 

But I was our small company's top performer, and when I worked on something I did it my way, and I did it alone.

We were in a massive growth phase, courting new clients on a monthly basis, and we were on the verge of landing a whale. 🐳 

A global chemical and manufacturing company; I guarantee you have some of their products in your home. 

Landing them would have been a huge win for our small consulting firm turned service provider, of which I was the 12th employee. 

But they had some conditions first. A stout list of must-haves we needed to add to our software, and only a month to prove it to them. 

I locked myself in the recording studio and went on a weeks-long coding bender, knocking out every item on the list in rapid succession, and drinking enough coffee to make my cardiologist send me a strongly worded letter. 

When I was done, my company trusted my work so much that they immediately handed it over to the potential client to evaluate...without a single person double-checking my work.

That...was a bad idea.

As good as I was or may have been, nobody's perfect. 

The placeholder images for documents we couldn't convert were supposed to say "SLIPSHEET." 

I put in "SPILSHEET." 🤦‍♂️ 

This was before spellcheck was built in to the IDE. 

They realized we weren't ready for the main stage and passed on us.

I was humiliated, and the company and I learned some valuable lessons:

🎸 Software developers are not testers. They have VERY different skillsets. You need both.

🎸 Over-reliance on a top performer ultimately stunts the growth of the company. Even for a 10x'er, there's only so much one person can do.

🎸 Checks and balances will save your bacon. Even rock stars need independent peer review of their code, and testing.

I gave up the rock star life after that, and started building teams and cultures focused on sustainable performance instead. 

What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made?

What did you learn from it? 

📷 Meeting actual rock stars and metal gods Judas Priest way back in 2008.

Seedling Saturday 🌱 It's time for the retrospective!

All the plants that are going to ship this year, have shipped. 

The product cycle is over. 

The garden is in maintenance mode. 

Before I spend the rest of the year enjoying the residuals, it's time to take a look backwards, and inwards, to see how I did. 

A clever product manager once gave me a retrospective template, and I've been running with it ever since. 

I'll put up a virtual whiteboard for our remote team to draw on, and split it into 4 quadrants: What went well, what didn't go well, shout-outs, and things we should change. 

We set a timer for 10 minutes for everyone to draw, and discuss it for the rest of the hour.

Without further ado...

👍 What went well:

• The legacy products, the firebush and lantana, started strong and finished stronger.

• The purple angel trumpets started late, but outperformed expectations.

• The moonflowers experienced viral growth, the holy grail for any startup.

👎  What didn't go so well:

• Not a single cleome or penta sprouted.

• Of the 6 cucumbers that sprouted, only one produced a single fruit, and summarily died right after it was harvested.

• Deferred maintenance caught up to me in the form of out of control weeds.

📣 Shout-outs:

• To my family for gifting me a new potting table and accessories. 

• To my wife for always being down for a trip to the garden center.

• To my audience here, for your feedback and encouragement.

♻️ What I should do differently next time:

• If I'm going to start seeds in pots, they need to be a lot bigger.

• Stay on top of those weeds!

• Start sowing earlier in the season; I spent too much time just trying to catch up.

And that's a wrap on my 2025 growing season!

How do you use retrospectives on your teams (or your hobbies?)

📷 My garden mullet - beauty in the front, mayhem in the back.

If you're not investing in the developer experience for your software engineering team, you're setting money on fire. 🔥💸🔥 

Developer Experience (DX) is simply how much friction and frustration stands between the engineering team you have and the functionality you want. 

It's the difference between building software, and surviving it. 

What are the biggest contributors to a poor DX?

⌛ Slow tools. Every minute lost to a slow build process, flaky CI/CD, or poor infrastructure performance is a minute you never get back. 

🔀 Inefficient, manual processes. How many steps does it take to get a test build going? Or a code review approved? Every additional step is sand in the gears of your high-performance development machine.

📅 Too. Many. Meetings. Every hour spent in a meeting costs you double that to get back into a flow state. Choose them wisely.

Why don't companies invest in DX? I've heard every excuse from managers why it's not a priority.

💸 “We don’t have budget for that.”
→ Wait until they find out how much it costs to replace a burned out engineer.

⏰ “We don’t have time for that, we need to focus on features.”
→ The best way to get more time is with a more efficient process.

📈 "We're hitting all our metrics, what's the problem?"
→ Just because the car’s still moving doesn’t mean the engine isn’t overheating.

🙈 "The developers just need to adapt.”
→ I will shoot you with my nerf gun for saying that. Great teams don’t succeed by suffering harder, they succeed by removing friction.

I say all that to say this:

Developing software is ruinously expensive.

Engineering teams are like exotic cars - they require expensive care and maintenance. 

If you think the maintenance costs are too high, wait until you see the replacement costs. 

👋 I'm Robert. I help companies make the most of their software engineering investment by empowering developers and removing friction.

"I should not be operating heavy equipment today." 🏗️ 

I typed that into Slack to notify my team, set my status to away, and touched some actual grass for a while. 

I had reached my mistake limit, and realized I needed to stop before I really broke something.

I write a lot about the need to proactively take breaks to maintain peak performance as a software engineer and leader, but it's easier said than done. 🧠 

In the heat of battle, it's hard to realize when your edge is slipping. 😓 

How do we know when we need to step away from the keyboard?

I borrow a tactic from my high-performance driving training: the 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗿𝘂𝗹𝗲.

The concept is simple: If you make 3 mistakes in a single session, you need to head back to the pits and figure out why. 

On track it's usually something like failing to notice a flag station, missing a reference point, or putting a wheel or two off in the dirt.

If these early warning signs are left unchecked, they can compound into an expensive and dangerous disaster.

What are the equivalents for a software developer? 

Here are my most common early warning signs:

⚠️ Ran a query against the wrong database.

⚠️ Coding in the wrong branch.

⚠️ Connected to the wrong K8s cluster.

⚠️ Typing into the Windows search bar instead of the browser.

That last one is a new symptom, and doing it means I am well and truly cooked. 😵‍💫

If three happen in a single day, I need to take a step back and figure out why.

How do you know when you've reached your limit? 

What performance misses tell you that it's time for a break?

📷 Touching grass is great in the middle of the work day, not so great in the middle of a track day 🏎️

Did microservices architecture win the space race? 🚀 

Just two years into Kennedy's "before this decade is out" challenge to land on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, the Office of Manned Space Flight director George Mueller knew we were in trouble.

Developing new rocket boosters is a risky business even today; it requires precise, methodical testing to do safely. 

But the traditional, conservative, linear method where lower rocket stages are fully vetted before repeating the process on the middle and finally the upper stages was going to take too long.

George's solution? A revolutionary alternative called "All-up testing."

Simply put, the plan was to test launch all three stages at once as a fully integrated solution, just like they would for a real mission.

𝘖𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵.

Bold? Yes.

Risky? 𝘈𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺.

So much so it took 4 years between the initial idea and it's actual execution due to concerns over the unorthodox approach (and a few other small details like building a launchpad that could actually survive the forces involved). 

Lest you think I'm stretching the microservices analogy to the breaking point, consider these similarities:

🚀 Separation of concerns through interfaces - similar to a composable software architecture, each major portion of the launch vehicle was developed concurrently, and separately, because the interfaces between them were well defined ahead of time.

🚀 Observability - with an unprecedented number of new systems being tested at once, they needed to develop telemetry monitoring that could capture emergent behavior that couldn't be fully predicted by testing the systems in isolation. 

🚀 Rapid iteration - by drastically reducing the number of test flights required, they were able to get actionable feedback on a much shorter time table. 

The results speak for themselves.

Apollo 4 launched on November 9, 1967, testing every major component of the vehicle simultaneously, and was a resounding success.

Two years later, humans set foot on the moon. 

When we talk about the space program’s legacy in software engineering, we often focus on the hardware breakthroughs and the lines of code that powered Apollo. 

But the real moonshot wasn’t just technical, it was procedural. 

The way teams collaborated, documented, tested, and led under pressure laid the foundation for modern engineering culture. 

There’s as much wisdom in the process as there is in the product.

📷 Visiting one of only 3 surviving Saturn V rockets at the Kennedy Space Center with my family back in 2017. Pictures don't do it justice.

Self-care is as easy as a walk in the park.

Or in my case, a walk 𝙩𝙤 the park.

My friends, I have been 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘺 remiss in my self-care duties this summer.

I've got every excuse...

🥵 The summer heat.

🤒 Illness.

🛌 Lack of sleep.

🏃 A tight schedule as a technology professional, content creator, father and husband.

But reality never changes because of an excuse, and the reality is I simply haven't made it a priority.

I'd been lamenting this fact for days when, at the end of my lunch, I realized I had 10 minutes left.

Just enough time to walk to the neighborhood park and back.

I didn't burn any calories, or get my heartrate up, or even sweat despite the heat index being over 100.

But I do believe this - the shortest walk you actually take beats the longer one you don't.

Every time. 

It was the smallest of wins.

I'll take it.

How are you doing with your self-care routine, or lack thereof?

Evening (re)post - "Bro, do you even agile?" edition.

Jim O'Mara recently posted "The 'Agile Industrial Complex' is collapsing," wherein he looks at recent staffing trends in the scrum master and agile coaches space (it's not pretty), and concludes:

"The shift is clear:
We’re moving from doing Agile (checking boxes)
to being agile (thinking independently, adapting fast, and delivering real outcomes)."

I thought it pairs well with my recent take on the subject, so I'm dusting it off tonight. 

Do go check out Jim's post, it pulls no punches:

🔗 https://lnkd.in/gJNZhrik

"Oh, so you're not really doing Agile then."

The temperature in the conference room dropped twenty degrees in that instant.

I was humoring a vendor who made some pretty bold promises about how they could transform my software engineering teams.

I wasn't looking for any help in that area, but I begrudgingly accepted their invitation because I liked to stay current on emerging trends.

They asked me to describe our engineering process, and blurted that out while I was mid-sentence.

I raised an unamused eyebrow in response, thanked them for their time, and went back to doing productive work.

To find out why, we have to go back in time to the dawn of my programming career.

Eight months after The Agile Manifesto was written, I started my first job in tech.

The people who hired me were 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘦𝘯.

They took a working archaeologist, who was digging holes in the ground and sifting the dirt through a screen at a museum the week before...

And turned him loose in the legal department of one of the world's biggest energy companies.

𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘯𝘰 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯.

Left to my own devices, I started building software for them the same way I had been building it for myself at the museum:

By watching the customer struggle with their existing solution, understanding the problem they needed to solve, and building it a piece at a time while they watched and tried it themselves.

My users sat at the desk next to mine. 

Feedback was clear and immediate.

I didn't have to 𝘥𝘰 agile, because I 𝘸𝘢𝘴 agile.

I had the time of my life.

Nine years later, Michael Carducci handed me a copy of The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmussen.

It was my first formal introduction to the the subject.

The processes and ceremonies were new to me, but I'd been living the 4 key values from day one:

1️⃣ Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

2️⃣ Working software over comprehensive documentation.

3️⃣ Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

4️⃣ Responding to change over following a plan.

If you're doing those 4 things, the rest tends to take care of itself.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

👋 Hi, I'm Robert. I help software engineering teams perform at their best by debugging the ecosystem they operate in.

"I'm standing on the feature recursion event horizon with a bowl of dog food in my hands."

That's how I described my mental state to my faithful coworker Cap'n Quacks. 

He just laughed and shook his head...he's seen me do this before. 

Whenever I'm facing a problem, I look for the nearest tool that can solve it. 

If the tool was never meant to solve that problem, so much the better.

I'm a duct tape programmer - I like taking ordinary, everyday components and bending them to my will to make them do things you wouldn't expect. 

My favorite example is the time I ran a SQL query to output a CSV that an Excel macro turned into MongoDB shell commands that I ran to clean up some data. 🌀 

I'm also on record as a fan of eating your own dog food - using the software you make for others to solve your own problems too. 

When I had a chance to use both approaches at once, my friend knew I was having a great day. 😂 

I was helping out as a development DBA on a team building a massive data processing pipeline with microservices. 

Of course there was a service for writing results to a database, so I was camped out there. 

Eventually we needed to write to Parquet files instead of a database. 

The files needed to be under a certain size for the client, but it was hard to predict the final size because of compression. The best I could do was measure bytes in and bytes out, and do some quick math to get the approximate compression ratio.

Collecting those metrics at scale was going to be a big hassle. 

Sure I could have used log aggregation, or maybe have Prometheus pick it up...

But my preferred tool for that kind of analysis is a good old fashioned relational database, and the database service was sitting right there...

You can guess what happened next. 😉 

When was the last time you used a feature you built in an unexpected way?

🔗 The original dog food adventure https://lnkd.in/g73Zu3sc

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