Engineering leadership lessons from building production systems and leading teams through complexity. Practical patterns over theory.
Team building, system rewrites, organizational design, and what actually works when scaling engineering organizations.
Some decisions can't wait for perfect information. Growing up in post-war Vietnam, I watched my father make hard calls that changed lives. Three days into Boston's biggest blizzard since 2015, I'm thinking about what it means to make the call on AI when the data isn't coming.
Sun Tzu wrote about war, but he was really writing about uncertainty. How to win through positioning when you can't predict outcomes. That feels relevant right now as AI reshapes work.
The last crypto winter felt like building in a pit while the world pretended blockchain didn't exist. This winter feels different. Stablecoins are processing over $1.3 trillion monthly. The energy is quieter, but more honest. Builders are solving problems that matter: payments, trust, liquidity, stability.
Many teams are tempted to rebuild a clean V2 from scratch, but this often fails because it discards history, tribal knowledge, and unwritten context. A more effective path is gradual migration with strong boundaries rather than extremes like full microservices. With AI reshaping the way we build, the challenge is knowing where it can augment workflows without replacing engineering discipline. The teams that thrive will move deliberately, applying clarity and judgment to every step.
The phalanx offers a powerful metaphor for engineering culture. It is not about individual heroes, but trust, discipline, and leaders who stand unshielded for their teams. Phalanx Engineering is a way of thinking about resilience that I’ve applied and refined in practice.
