About

I spent two years working toward a promotion to senior engineer, and I got there.

The biggest thing I learned is that the gap between mid-level and senior is mostly not about code. It’s about the scope you own, the judgment you bring to trade-offs, how clearly you write, how well you bring people to a decision, and how deeply you understand the technology you build on. Nobody hands you that list. You piece it together from feedback, from reviews and from watching people who are already there.

This blog is where I write down what I learned, so you can get there faster than I did. It also covers what changes now that LLMs write a lot of the code: when generating code is cheap, judgment is what makes you senior.

• Design docs and making decisions with other people
• Code review, including code nobody fully wrote
• Estimates, scope and saying no
• Owning systems in production
• Deep dives into the technologies behind the work: how they behave under load, where they break, and what the docs leave out

Posts are short and practical: what I tried, what worked, and what I’d do differently. Follow along by email below or via RSS.