Engineering Process

Engineering meetings have a bad reputation, and much of it is earned. Too many meetings are called when an async message would suffice, run without a clear purpose, and end without decisions or next steps. The people who attend feel their time was wasted. The people who called the meeting often didn’t accomplish what they intended. This post is specifically about the meetings that matter at the staff engineer level: design reviews, architectural decision meetings, technical alignment sessions, and cross-team coordination. These are meetings worth doing well — they’re how complex technical work gets coordinated. The goal is not to eliminate them but to make them actually work. ...

Technical design documents (TDDs) — sometimes called design docs, RFCs, or tech specs — are one of the most valuable tools available to staff engineers. When done well, they create alignment before implementation, surface risks early, and create a durable record of why decisions were made. When done poorly, they’re ignored, debated endlessly, or written as formalities after the decision is already made. This post is about writing TDDs that work: getting the right people to the right decision with minimum friction. ...