After a few years spent moving from advising organisations on transformation to leading Thoughtworks teams, I’m returning to writing because the questions facing technology leaders have fundamentally changed.
When I started this blog, my thinking was much more focused on the craft of technology. I wrote about software delivery, engineering practices, architecture, agile ways of working, and the many things that help teams build better software.
Over the years, as my role evolved from advising organisations through transformation to leading large-scale technology change, my perspective expanded.
The technology still matters. The practices still matter.
But the questions became bigger.
The more time I spend working with technology organisations, the more I realise that many of the challenges we face are not really technology problems.
They are organisational problems.
They are questions about how we make decisions, how we structure teams, how we create environments where people can do their best work, and how we build organisations that can adapt when the world changes faster than we expected.
These are the questions I find myself thinking about now.
Why the blog went quiet
The funny thing is, I never really stopped writing. The ideas kept coming.
The conversations I was having with engineers, leaders, and organisations became more interesting. The technology landscape changed dramatically. AI went from something we were experimenting with to something that is starting to fundamentally reshape how software is built.
But the blog itself became a barrier.
This site was originally built using Jekyll and Ruby. At the time, it was a great choice. It was simple, fast, and gave me complete control. Over time, though, every time I came back to write something, I found myself spending more energy on the mechanics of publishing than the actual thinking.
I would sit down with an idea. Then I would update dependencies. Fix something in the build pipeline. Remember how the deployment worked. And somewhere along the way, the creative energy would disappear.
The irony was that I had created a tool to help me share ideas, but maintaining the tool had become the thing stopping me from sharing them.
A different way of building
Recently, I decided to fix the problem rather than work around it.
In the past, I probably would have treated this as a small software project. I would have researched frameworks, planned the migration, and slowly worked through the details.
Instead, I sat down with Claude Code and migrated the blog to Astro, updated the foundations, cleaned up the edges, and redeployed it. In about an hour.
The technology itself is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what this says about how we work. For years, we have talked about removing friction from software delivery. AI is now changing where that friction exists. The time between having an idea and turning it into something real is shrinking. That changes what becomes valuable. The ability to implement still matters.
But so do the things around it:
- Knowing what problem is worth solving
- Understanding trade-offs
- Connecting ideas
- Asking better questions
- Having judgement
The questions I’m exploring now
This is the space I want to explore more through this blog.
How does AI change the way we build software?
What happens to engineering practices when generating code becomes easier?
How do teams and organisations adapt when the pace of change accelerates?
What does engineering excellence mean in a world where AI becomes part of everyday development?
How do technology leaders create organisations that have more options available to them when the future is uncertain?
I have always believed that technology creates possibilities.
The question I am increasingly interested in is:
How do we build organisations that are capable of taking advantage of them?
There is a lot I want to catch up on. A few years of thinking, conversations, experiments, and lessons that never made it onto the page.
So this is me starting again. A little older. Hopefully a little wiser. And with a much bigger set of questions to explore.