{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
  "title": "Writing — John Patterson",
  "home_page_url": "https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog",
  "feed_url": "https://www.johnppatterson.com/feed.json",
  "description": "Essays on software engineering and engineering management by John Patterson — engineering manager in Amsterdam.",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "John Patterson",
      "url": "https://www.johnppatterson.com"
    }
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog/welcome",
      "url": "https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog/welcome",
      "title": "Starting to write things down",
      "summary": "A place to put what I've learned about building software and building the teams that build it.",
      "content_html": "<p>Most of what I’ve learned in this job arrived as a conversation: a retro that went\nsideways, a design review that saved a quarter, a one-on-one where someone told me\nsomething I did not want to hear. Very little of it is written down, which means I\nkeep re-deriving it.</p>\n<p>So this is the place where I write it down.</p>\n<h2 id=\"what-i-expect-to-write-about\" tabindex=\"-1\">What I expect to write about <a class=\"heading-anchor\" href=\"#what-i-expect-to-write-about\" aria-hidden=\"true\">#</a></h2>\n<p>Roughly three things, in whatever mix the week produces:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Engineering management</strong> — hiring, growing senior engineers into leaders, running\nteams that keep working when I’m not in the room.</li>\n<li><strong>Engineering</strong> — the technical decisions that turn out to be organisational ones,\nand the ones that really are just technical.</li>\n<li><strong>The seams between them</strong> — planning, prioritisation, and working with Product and\nDesign as co-authors rather than as a queue.</li>\n</ul>\n<h2 id=\"how-this-works\" tabindex=\"-1\">How this works <a class=\"heading-anchor\" href=\"#how-this-works\" aria-hidden=\"true\">#</a></h2>\n<p>Posts are Markdown files in this repository. There is an <a href=\"https://www.johnppatterson.com/rss.xml\">RSS feed</a> if you\nprefer to read on your own terms, an <a href=\"https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog/archive\">archive</a> if you want the whole\nlist, and search on the <a href=\"https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog\">writing index</a> that runs entirely in your browser.</p>\n<p>If something here is wrong, or right but incomplete, I would genuinely like to hear\nabout it.</p>\n",
      "date_published": "2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z",
      "date_modified": "2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z",
      "tags": [
        "Engineering management",
        "Meta"
      ]
    }
  ]
}