Things I Believe

People

• Lead with empathy.
• Assume good intent first.
• They might just be having a bad day.
• Criticism is useful if you can listen without ego.

Build

• Bias toward action. Speed is a superpower.
• Small teams with real ownership beat large, coordinated headcount.
• AI-native teams move at a different speed than teams that don’t adapt.
• Shipping real software beats perfect strategy decks every time.
• Adoption > releases; if no one uses it, it doesn’t exist.
• Opinionated defaults are a feature, not a risk, when you know the domain.
• Infrastructure products win when they remove whole categories of meetings, not add new dashboards.
• The best infrastructure feels like a language the team already speaks, not a ceremony they have to learn first.

Security

• Identity and authorization are core foundations in well-built software, not just compliance checkboxes.
• Good AuthN/AuthZ disappears; bad auth is all users notice.
• ReBAC only works at scale when you treat it as a database problem, not a middleware problem.
• Security is culture and practice, not a one-off or an afterthought.
• Authorization that doesn’t model real-world relationships will always be bypassed in real workflows.
• You can’t retrofit fine-grained authorization onto a product that never modeled its domain well.

Systems

• Simple systems win; clever systems accumulate pain over time.
• The right abstractions eliminate whole classes of problems.
• Observability is a foundational feature, not an add-on.
• Hardware and distributed systems bend latency and cost; they’re not vanity metrics on a slide.

Teams

• Leaders are the ones who take responsibility, not the ones with the title.
• You earn trust by doing the unglamorous work consistently.
• Great teams are built, not hired; hiring is just the starting condition.
• Clear expectations prevent most “people problems” before they ever start.

Developer Experience

• DX is product-market fit for APIs.
• Docs, examples, and SDKs are as important as the core product.
• Teaching is the highest-leverage way to change how people build and think.
• Authenticity beats polish in talks, streams, and content you ship.
• A great API makes the happy path the obvious path.

Growth

• Grit and curiosity compound more than raw talent.
• The best opportunities come from following the problems you can’t stop thinking about.
• Side projects and open source compound your career in ways nothing else does.
• Design your career like a product: iterate, measure, and pivot when the data changes.

All of this is subject to revision. The point of writing it down is to notice when it changes.