Field notes,
in progress.
An irregular journal of software, leadership, and the occasional rant. Some pieces are practical. Some are me thinking out loud and hoping it’s useful to someone else.
Steel, Rivers, and Rewrites: What Pittsburgh Taught Me About Building Things That Last
I did not grow up in Pittsburgh.
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Working With Your Brain, Not Against It: ADHD and Software Development
The most productive three hours of my week look suspicious from the outside. No meetings, no Slack, headphones in, do not disturb. From the inside, it's the only time I'm actually working.
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You knew the answer and you didn't say it
I was in an architecture review a few years back. Fifteen people on the call, half of them senior engineers. Someone proposed a caching strategy that I knew would fall apart under concurrent writes. I'd hit that exact failure mode six months earlier on a different project. I had the scars and the postmortem to prove it.
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Why Resident Alien gets imposter syndrome right (and what your team can do about it)
If you've watched Resident Alien, you know the core premise: Harry, an alien, crashes on Earth and spends the series pretending to be a human so he can complete his mission (and eventually repair his spaceship). He's brilliant at it. He studies human behavior obsessively. He nails the performance. He says and does all the right things.
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What Yellowjackets taught me about development teams (and why you should never work in survival mode)
After writing about what Ted Lasso taught me about being a Scrum Master, someone asked if I had any other TV shows that shaped my thinking on teams. I hesitated before answering "Yellowjackets," because unlike Ted's relentlessly optimistic football club, Yellowjackets is about a high school soccer team that crashes in the Canadian wilderness and descends into Lord of the Flies-style chaos. But here's the thing: I've seen more development teams operating like the Yellowjackets survivors than I'd like to admit. And the show's unflinching look at what happens when teams break down under pressure offers lessons that Ted Lasso's feel-good narrative can't.
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What Ted Lasso taught me as a scrum master
It's no secret that I am not a sports person. I don't follow football, baseball, basketball, or any of the major leagues. My idea of athleticism is walking briskly to the coffee shop without getting winded. So when I first heard about Ted Lasso, I was skeptical. But, I gave it a shot. And when Ted Lasso first walked into that Richmond AFC locker room with his signature mustache and relentless optimism, I had no idea I was watching a masterclass in servant leadership. Sure, he knew nothing about football (nor did I), but he knew everything about people.
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Stop Managing Projects with Scrum; Start Managing Conversations
Scrum gets mislabeled as project management. Then we ask it to do budget tracking, dependency orchestration, and scope control. No wonder it feels clumsy. Scrum is not your project management framework. Scrum is your communication framework for complex work. It sets the cadence, topics, and decision rules so a team can learn fast and adapt even faster. If you treat it that way, delivery gets less brittle and leadership gets better signal with less theater.
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The Sprint Planning Boss Battle: Why Every Story Point Estimate Is a Dice Roll
You know that moment in sprint planning when everyone reveals their story point estimates simultaneously, and the numbers range from 2 to 13? That's not a planning failure—that's collaborative dice rolling at its finest. Just like a D&D party assessing whether they can take on a dragon, your development team is essentially asking "What are the odds we can pull this off?" The answer, as any seasoned dungeon crawler knows, depends on your party composition, available equipment, and whether anyone remembered to bring healing potions.
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The 14 Personality Types Every Scrum Master Encounters (And How to Work With Each One)
Ever walked into a retrospective and immediately spotted the person frantically scribbling diagrams in the corner while someone else dominates the conversation? Or noticed how one team member always finds the potential pitfalls while another sees nothing but opportunity? Welcome to the beautiful chaos of agile team dynamics. Understanding these personality types isn't just helpful—it's essential for any Scrum Master who wants to facilitate effectively and unlock their team's full potential.
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Scrumgeons & Dragons: Why Your Development Team Is Just a Really Organized D&D Party
Ever notice how a well-run Scrum team feels suspiciously like a D&D campaign? The Scrum Master guides the narrative, developers bring specialized skills to overcome challenges, and everyone rolls dice (story points) to see how badly they've underestimated the complexity of "simple" tasks. After years of facilitating sprints and rolling d20s, I've realized these frameworks aren't just similar—they're practically the same game with different terminology.
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When Team Members Check Out: A Scrum Master's Guide to Re-engagement
You know the signs: minimal participation in standup, delayed deliverables, and that thousand-yard stare during retrospectives.
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working with git: archive
You're about to deploy to production and your PM asks for "just a clean copy of the code without all that Git history stuff." Or maybe you need to package a specific release for a client who shouldn't see your development branches. Enter git archive — the Git command that's criminally underused despite solving these exact problems elegantly.
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The Scrum Master's Paradox: Leading Without Authority While Battling Self-Doubt
There I was, facilitating a retrospective for a team of brilliant engineers, when someone asked a technical question that made my stomach drop. I nodded thoughtfully, buying time, while my inner voice screamed: "You have no idea what they're talking about, do you?" Welcome to the Scrum Master's paradox — leading teams through complex technical challenges while secretly wondering if you belong in the room at all.
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Courage as a Scrum Value: The Catalyst for Real Transparency
How the Scrum value of Courage transforms transparency from corporate theater into genuine workflow visibility that drives better outcomes.
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Surprise Driven Development
Welcome to Surprise Driven Development (SDD) — the revolutionary methodology where uncertainty isn't a bug, it's a feature. Why plan when you can panic? Why document when you can discover? Join me as we explore the chaotic art of building software where every deployment is Christmas morning and every bug is a delightful present from your past self.
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Traits of a great Scrum Master: curiosity
The best Scrum Masters I've worked with share one defining trait: they're genuinely curious about everything. Not the kind of curiosity that leads to micromanaging or endless questioning, but the type that drives continuous learning, problem-solving, and team growth. They ask "why" when processes break down, "what if" when exploring solutions, and "how might we" when facilitating team discussions.
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