Essays & Articles
On engineering leadership, sociotechnical architecture, and AI adoption.
- Aug 2026
InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends Report 2026 ↗
Four trend contributions to InfoQ's annual report: AI transformation frameworks and maturity, ethical and safe AI as an engineering practice, the natural selection of ways of working, and the existential crisis facing the pre-AI developer and manager.
- Aug 2026
A Facilitating Software Architecture Story: Podcast Companion ↗
A companion piece to the VirtualDDD podcast conversation — on how hidden coupling hides in plain sight, how the language a team uses shapes the architecture it builds, and what it takes to lead people through an architecture transformation.
- Dec 2025
Architecture Through Different Lenses 2025 ↗
The annual InfoQ architecture trends magazine — my Holistic Engineering article opens the issue, framing the year's themes around sociotechnical thinking and organic problem solving.
- Nov 2025
Holistic Engineering ↗
Why treating engineering as a purely technical discipline creates invisible failure modes — and how expanding your model to include the organisational and social systems changes everything.
- 2025
Social Decision Records and Team APIs: Documenting Human Interactions for Better Collaboration ↗
A collaboration with Matthew Skelton on extending Social Decision Records and Team APIs as complementary practices for capturing the human side of team boundaries and interactions.
- Sep 2024
Social Decision Records: ADRs for Human Interactions ↗
Teams document their technical decisions and forget the human ones — commitments made between teams, personnel loans, organisational change. Social Decision Records borrow the structure of ADRs to capture the human and managerial aspects of a decision instead.