Engineering Notes

26 Nov 2025

Architect Your Promotion Pipeline with Growth Systems Not Career Ladders

Most engineering managers think about promotions reactively: someone performs well, you promote them. But exceptional E...

26 Nov 2025

Markov Decision Processes as the Foundation of Sequential Decision-Making

**Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)** provide the mathematical framework for sequential decision-making under uncertaint...

25 Nov 2025

Design Your Teams Decision Latency

Most engineering managers obsess over making the *right* decisions. But the teams that win aren't necessarily the ones ...

25 Nov 2025

How AI Agents Learn from Themselves Through Self-Play and Iterative Refinement

Explore how AI agents improve through self-play and iterative refinement—from AlphaGo's game mastery to modern LLM self-correction techniques.

24 Nov 2025

Shape the Decision Space Before the Decision

The most impactful engineering managers don't make great decisions—they ensure great decisions get made without them. ...

17 Nov 2025

Engineer the Ramp-Up Time to Fix Your Scalability Bottleneck

The single most underestimated constraint in scaling engineering organizations is not hiring velocity, budget, or techn...

17 Nov 2025

Test-Time Compute and o1-Style Reasoning for Scaling Intelligence Through Inference

**Test-time compute scaling** is the principle that allowing a model to reason longer during inference, rather than jus...

16 Nov 2025

Master Calibration for Consistent Fair Decisions at Scale

The best engineering managers I know have mastered a skill rarely discussed in management literature: **calibration**. ...

16 Nov 2025

Multi-Armed Bandits and the Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma in Agent Learning

Master the fundamental problem of sequential decision-making under uncertainty and learn how AI agents balance trying new actions versus exploiting known rewards

15 Nov 2025

Build Context Portability, Not Knowledge Silos

The best engineering managers don't just manage people—they architect how context flows through their organization. The...