Engineering Notes

13 Oct 2025

Hire for Trajectory, Not Just Skills

Most engineering managers hire for what candidates can do today. Great engineering managers hire for where candidates w...

12 Oct 2025

Building Stateful AI Systems with LangGraph and Agentic Workflow Graphs

Learn how to build complex, stateful AI agent systems using graph-based architectures with LangGraph—a paradigm shift from linear chains to cyclic, controllable workflows.

12 Oct 2025

How Great EMs Shape Reality Through Storytelling

The best engineering managers understand a powerful truth: **the story you tell about your team's work often matters mo...

11 Oct 2025

Lead with Leading Indicators to Predict Problems Before They Happen

Most engineering managers are firefighters. They react to outages, missed deadlines, and team burnout after the damage ...

10 Oct 2025

The Multiplier Mindset for Identifying and Amplifying Force Multipliers

Most engineering managers operate in **addition mode**: hire another engineer, add another process, create another meet...

09 Oct 2025

Architect Your Culture with Decision Records

Most engineering managers focus on making good decisions. The best ones focus on **capturing why decisions were made**....

08 Oct 2025

Make Decisions Reversible

One of the highest-leverage skills you can develop as an engineering manager is **designing your decisions to be revers...

07 Oct 2025

Build Escalation Paths, Not Firefighters

The best engineering managers don't pride themselves on being heroic problem-solvers. They build systems that prevent p...

07 Oct 2025

Measure What Matters Through Data-Informed Leadership

As an engineering manager, your ability to lead effectively at scale hinges on one crucial skill: **measuring what matt...

07 Oct 2025

Monte Carlo Tree Search from Games to LLMs

## Concept Introduction **Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)** is a heuristic search algorithm for finding optimal decisio...