Blog

I've been writing since 2002, when I was a student at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Over twenty years the subjects have changed, but the habit hasn't: I write to understand something, and then I write to teach it.

The posts here are a selection from that history. The earliest are about computing, motivation and why open source matters. Later ones follow my move to Sydney in 2011, my work at Google and Microsoft, and what I learned about focus, notebooks, emails and coaching. My technical writing about C++ lives at C++ Soup. The ideas about how software teams work grew into my book, Modern Software Engineering.

Through all of it I look at software as a system: how it behaves, how we measure it, and how the people building it learn and improve. These are the posts I'd still stand behind. If one helps you, please share it, or write to me at [email protected].