Introduction

I thought it was initially going to be about infrastructure but that topic never held my interest long enough to make it worthwhile.

More recently I've been focused on what it means to be a minimalist - and what lessons we can learn from minimalism in our work lives. Going beyond that, I think I have found what I want to share.

Throughout our careers as engineers, we encounter the same problems over and over again. From small technical issues like broken pipelines, misconfigured CORs or poorly optimised DB queries. To the bigger problems like dealing with mountains of legacy services and rushed architectural thinking.

Even the really hard people and organisational problems tend to repeat. How do you motivate a team? How do you rebuild psychological safety after it's been destroyed? How do you articulate your strategy so business stakeholders don't just understand it but genuinely believe in it?

So that's what I want to talk about. All of the problems (big and small) I've encountered over my career, how I solved them, how I failed to solve them, and what I learnt along the way.

To remind myself. And to hopefully help you along your way.