About
How do you scale impact as a leader? Leaders enable the people they lead to do their best work. And to scale this, leaders must encourage and create more leaders.
Over my 20 years of experience working in computer systems, I’ve consistently sought to grow leaders in my organizations. The opportunities I’ve seen potential leaders need to strengthen are typically a combination of building up their technical competence and their ability to lead (or follow) others. This site is a living attempt to bring together my experience to help you close these gaps for yourself and your teams.
You can learn more about me on my website.
Inspirations
Everyone’s early years are filled with various forms of learning. My parents were both college professors, and so I was always exposed to teaching and learning to some degree. My father built interactive Mathematica notebooks in the 1990s to help students visualize different solutions, allowing them to explore the impact of things like different initial conditions. He always emphasized to me the importance of deeply understanding material, and pushing me to learn further.
Technology
When I was a teaching assistant for MIT’s Computer Systems Engineering course,
we introduced the concepts of “Hands On” exercises to supplement reading
materials. Instead of merely reading about naming systems, students were also
given an assignment to explore DNS using
dig or
observe the timings of a loop to directly detect the size of their CPU’s L1 and
L2 caches. Active Learning remains an important part of the course’s
philosophy.
When we look around at learning resources, we do find many many examples available today:
- The Open Source Society University provides a computer science syllabus pointing a learner at materials and courses that are publicly available.
- Papers We Love collects key research papers for a variety of topics.
- FreeCodeCamp has thousands of videos and tutorials guiding you through evey conceivable topic.
But there aren’t many resources designed to quickly get an existing software engineer to more deeply understand core fundamentals.
In 2012, Bret Victor wrote an incredible essay about Learnable Programming where he lays out how much of the way we teach programming makes it hard to learn, and how we might create an environment to make it easier through visualizations (and many other cool techniques). In 2024, Andy Matuschak gave a talk titled “How Might We Learn” bridging together some ideas of practical learning guided by good tactical structures. His project Quantum Country is an attempt to bring in some of those ideas by bringing active recall and spaced repetition into a textbook format, aimed at helping people learn quantum computing.
The best person in this space that I know of is Julia Evans, whose wizard zines offer deep technical learning in a friendly visual format. She has little playgrounds that she has built, such as Mess with DNS. Part of the goal of this site is to collect or potentially create more of these resources.
People
From a leadership perspective, we are blessed in 2025 with many amazing books on engineering leadership that have come out in the past few years. There are also great general purpose management and leadership books that have stood out. A quick web search will reveal many social media or blog posts sharing various lists of book recommendations for aspiring leaders.
One example I like is investor Ray Dalio’s Principles book explaining his management principles; what is most interesting to me is the free accompanying app that enhances the content with case studies and the ability to favorite and create your own principles.
In looking to build something that bridges the technical and leadership concepts together, Cedric Chin’s Common Cog website is a clear inspiration. Common Cog is full of deeply researched articles on a collection of topics all related to driving success in business. In particular, Cedric seeks to bring together key topics that drive business expertise: excellence at operations, understanding of markets (your product), and of capital (getting and using money). This site aspires to bring a similar focus to tech leadership.
Common Cog also explores how to build expertise quickly, looking at cognitive science research as well as domains such as the military where people must learn languages or skills very quickly. He emphasizes the importance of building your own internal mental models through experience and active construction.
Bringing it together
I hope this site brings together the concepts above to create an engaging way for you to develop the skills you hope to apply to take your career and your organization to its next milestones.