Writing — John Patterson https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog Essays on software engineering and engineering management by John Patterson — engineering manager in Amsterdam. en Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Starting to write things down https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog/welcome https://www.johnppatterson.com/blog/welcome Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT A place to put what I've learned about building software and building the teams that build it. Engineering management Meta Most of what I’ve learned in this job arrived as a conversation: a retro that went sideways, a design review that saved a quarter, a one-on-one where someone told me something I did not want to hear. Very little of it is written down, which means I keep re-deriving it.

So this is the place where I write it down.

What I expect to write about

Roughly three things, in whatever mix the week produces:

  • Engineering management — hiring, growing senior engineers into leaders, running teams that keep working when I’m not in the room.
  • Engineering — the technical decisions that turn out to be organisational ones, and the ones that really are just technical.
  • The seams between them — planning, prioritisation, and working with Product and Design as co-authors rather than as a queue.

How this works

Posts are Markdown files in this repository. There is an RSS feed if you prefer to read on your own terms, an archive if you want the whole list, and search on the writing index that runs entirely in your browser.

If something here is wrong, or right but incomplete, I would genuinely like to hear about it.

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