Performance reviews are a perennial headache in many organizations – often seen as bureaucratic, time‐consuming, and stressful for managers and employees alike. With the rise of AI tools, some argue we might automate or even eliminate traditional reviews. Is it realistic (or wise) to have AI do our performance reviews? I believe the answer is no: while AI can assist, it cannot replace the thoughtful human effort that makes reviews valuable. The idea that we can fully offload performance…

A career development plan is a structured approach to professional growth. It’s a tool for both individuals and managers to align on expectations, identify opportunities, and measure progress. A well-crafted plan can be the difference between a reactive career and a proactive one.

When you’re a small team, pairing each new hire 1:1 works great—but as you grow, that model becomes overwhelming. Mentorship pods solve this by pairing a single mentor with a small cohort of new engineers. They learn together, share questions, and ramp up faster than going it alone.

We’ve all faced the dilemma: should we rush a quick feature out the door, or spend extra time refactoring code? That choice often creates technical debt—shortcuts in code, architecture, or process that make future work harder. Left unaddressed, debt piles up and slows your entire team down.

When something breaks in production—maybe a server crashes or a deployment goes sideways—it’s tempting to point fingers and hunt for the person “at fault.” But that only breeds fear and discourages honest discussion. A blameless postmortem flips the script: it treats every outage as a chance to learn how our systems and processes can improve, rather than a moment for shame.

In the software development world, teams often face the dilemma of whether to build a tool in-house or purchase an existing solution. This “build vs. buy” debate can significantly impact a company’s efficiency, budget, and focus. A quintessential example of this debate is the implementation of feature flags.

The primary purpose of one-on-one meetings is to give your reports a chance to discuss issues and topics that they find important. It’s an opportunity for them to bring up concerns, challenges, and ideas that might not surface during regular team meetings. This is not a meeting to get status updates on projects! Schedule other time for that.

Wanted to share the results of the work we’ve been doing to improve performance and stabilize our ES cluster.

If you’re looking for moment.js alternatives, I’d recommend reading this article about smaller, lighter-weight moment.js alternatives.

Wanted to share some insights my team has found with changing sharding strategies for ElasticSearch (ES).