Engineering leadership

Before I managed people, I designed systems. Growing Tremend was pretty much an architectural challenge, whether it was called reliability, load balancing, observability, loose coupling, APIs or monolithic vs microservices. Reliability meant that no project depended on a single person. Load balancing was delegation: moving work away from the few people everyone queued behind, starting with the founders. Observability was knowing how a team was doing without standing over it. And the monolith question never goes away: one centre that decides everything, or many small teams that each decide for themselves and pay for it in coordination. And the answer depends on which phase of the project you’re in. Interviews from those years are below.