After 27 years in tech—working at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS, then coaching dozens of colleagues through promotions from both sides—I’ve learned something that most people get backwards: Your career belongs to you. Not your company. Not your manager. Not the promotion committee. Everything el…
A YouTube viewer reached out to me the other day after watching one of my videos. He’d just started at a big tech company and wanted to know: How do you navigate the fog? How do you figure out what to focus on? What are things to avoid?
I’ve felt that fog three times—at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS. And after 27 years and countless conversations with mentees, I think there are three phases that help cut through it.
A 25-year career without goals—and why that worked better than the alternative This guitar is more than 15 years old. It’s my second one—the first was bought and sold in the ’80s. I tried lessons. Self-teaching. Regular practice. Still couldn’t play a recognizable song. Now it collects dust, remindi…
Most people use AI the way our parents used the Internet in 1995. They’d dial up their modem, check the weather forecast on Yahoo, maybe look up a recipe, and call it a day. The idea that this same technology would eventually let them video call their grandchildren, run a business, or access humani…
Watching Werner Vogels deliver his 2025 re:Invent keynote last week, I experienced one of those rare moments where separate threads suddenly converge. There he was, Amazon’s CTO since 2005, laying out five principles for “Renaissance Developers”, and I realized: these weren’t just career advice for …
In 2014, I was preparing my AWS re:Invent presentation on “Running Lean Architectures.” I had my slides ready: agenda, bio, resources. Then I stopped. Why was I presenting this in the first place? The answer: to help people save money on AWS. Not to check boxes on a corporate template. Not to prove …
On constrained serendipity, learning by doing, and whether the system is the art. I’m chatting with Claude, kicking around ideas on building a tool that generates AI images, but without the prompting. I like to start these chats by brain-dumping ideas into it. In this case it’s about auto-generating…
February 1998. Munich. Sun Microsystems. My first customer presentation. I stood in front of a roomful of IT professionals with a marketing deck about our “newest, better workgroup server.” I hadn’t rehearsed beyond flipping through the slides a couple of times. I didn’t know who these people were o…
A package arrived a few months ago. Inside: a deck of cards with a red telephone on the box. “The Mentor Deck” by Seth Godin. I’m a beta tester, so I got one of the first 2,000 decks ever made. Each card has a QR code on the back that launches an AI conversation with a virtual mentor—Seth himself, o…
I had a problem.
I wanted to create a YouTube channel and had my first video ready to go, but then… nothing. Weeks passed. I had ideas, I had equipment, and I’d watched enough tutorials to edit like a pro. But I couldn’t get myself to shoot video number two.
Classic procrastination.
So I did what I often do when I’m stuck: I talked to Claude. But this time, I didn’t just ask for advice. I invited two experts into the conversation to help me figure this out.
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a former colleague who interviewed for a new job because she couldn’t stand her current one. Getting a new offer made her feel relieved and optimistic again: She had escaped.
Many others may not be so lucky this year.
Tech layoffs are accelerating. The economy—if we’re honest and look past the AI boom—looks shaky. Gold prices are spiking, which historically signals uncertainty ahead. And if you’re reading this feeling worried about your job, your future, or the general state of things, I know well how you feel.
Over 27 years and five major crises, I’ve learned one thing: the difference between thriving and drowning isn’t luck—it’s knowing what you can change and what you can’t.
It’s December 2024. I’m at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, coaching speakers on how to communicate effectively with technical audiences. Meanwhile, 9,258 kilometers away in Munich, a room full of homeowners is debating whether my 7.6-kilogram solar panels will blow off my balcony in the wind. This story…
“To me, you’re not just Systems Engineers—you are Speaking Engineers. I’ve got plenty of engineers working on great products. However, I need you to speak to customers and earn their trust in our technology.” That was Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, talking to a room full of technical profes…
All I wanted was to press a button and hear SomaFM Groove Salad through my home stereo. 🎵
What I got instead was six weeks of diving into AV receiver telnet commands, Raspberry Pi power mysteries, and NFC webhook proxies. Sometimes I spent an entire week debugging my Home Assistant setup only to discover I’d been using the wrong IP address the whole time 🤦♂️.
But here’s the thing: the journey is the reward. Sure, I could have just lived with telling Alexa to turn on my AV receiver, connect to it over Bluetooth, then asking it to play what I want. But then I wouldn’t have learned how UPNP broadcasts get mangled by WiFi bridge modes, or that a 2.2W Raspberry Pi can teach you more about power supply stability than any electrical engineering textbook.
This is the story of how a simple goal—press button, get music—led me down some of the most beautifully complex rabbit holes I’ve explored in years. And why that complexity is exactly the point. 🐰
Working for my then employer’s Munich office in 2011, I felt it—that hollow sensation when your career becomes a treadmill. The acquisition of the company I originally joined had stripped away the technological beauty and purpose I’d thrived on for more than a decade. The rigid culture, the pure commercial focus, the loss of autonomy.
I wasn’t incompetent, broke, or irrelevant… I was just bored.
And boredom, I realized, was the first horseman of a dying career.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
— Robert A. Heinlein
When I read a recent article about Expert Generalists on Martin Fowler’s blog, I immediately changed my LinkedIn title. Finally, someone had named what I’d been doing for 27 years without realizing it!
“How can we become a digital company?” The manufacturing executive looked genuinely worried. “We make physical products, but everyone says software is eating the world.” I’ve heard variations of this question hundreds of times over the past decade. Sometimes it’s about cloud computing, sometimes mob…
Here’s a secret: after almost 13 years at Amazon Web Services, I still felt like most people around me were smarter and more capable than me. And now, as a blogger looking at other writers? That feeling hasn’t gone away. If this sounds familiar, you’re experiencing imposter syndrome—and you’re in ex…
Back in the late 80s, I was a computer-enthusiastic teenager helping my mother, who was leading the German consulate in Rome at the time. I still remember teaching her secretaries how to use PCs for word processing instead of their trusty typewriters. I guess that was my very first gig as tech suppo…
I remember a colleague, let’s call her Sarah, who was checking her phone every minute during our 30-minute meeting, apologizing for being distracted, mentioning her endless to-do list. She was drowning, and she didn’t even know it. Sounds familiar? Here’s what I learned: overwhelm is not a time mana…