Articles on Serenity | The intervention consultancy for struggling software teams

Energy Management Beats Time Management in Engineering

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you look at a standard burn-down chart or a timesheet, software development looks deceptively linear. One hour of coding equals one unit of output. If a project is falling behind, the “logical” management solution is to add more hours, ask the team to stay late, work a weekend, or squeeze in “just one more ticket” before the sprint closes. Or if you have the payroll, add more engineers.

But anyone who has actually written code knows this is a lie.

Excellence is a Habit: Why Shipping Software Beats Perfection

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The urge to “rewrite it all” is often disguised as a pursuit of excellence.

We’ve all seen the pattern. An engineer opens a file and becomes allergic to what they see. Maybe it’s messy legacy code, a “temporary” hack that is now celebrating its third birthday, or an architectural pattern that no longer fits the scale of the application.

The instinct is to fix it. To overhaul it. To make it clean, modern, and “right.” This is a good instinct! We should seek to improve things as we go, and developing that conscientiousness is vital for any senior engineer.

"Why Is Everything So Slow?", and how to fix it with Lead Time

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Everything feels…slow. You have an idea, or a critical feature, or an urgent bug fix, but it takes forever to send it through the process. Half the time it feels like it’s not even going through the process, it just dies on someone’s desk. Vanishing into the black box for weeks or months is a silent killer, and it’s both frustrating and disrespectful for anyone who’s making requests/demands on an engineering team.

Debt or Slop?

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I once worked with a guy named Ev, who is quite possibly one of the most prolific yet worst programmers I’ve ever worked with. During a review of something he implemented, another guy on the team asked “Who is benefitting from all of this code? Are we trying to please the gods of programming by offering them a sacrifice of so many lines of code?”

Following up after him was demoralizing. His implementations were often done out of band and just sort of wedged into production. Most of his work had to be completely rewritten, and the replacement process took far longer than just doing it correctly the first time. Nearly everything else had to be decommissioned, often with apologies to the internal stakeholders and clients.

Taste: In Defense of the Rockstar Programmer

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back in the early 2000s, tech recruiters got their talons on a new phrase: the “rockstar developer”. They’d heard of this mythical creature: the one who ships features at a dizzying pace, who can solve impossible problems overnight, who know exactly what to do.

Like most industry terms, it got twisted, overused, and turned into corporate-speak for someone who we all hate. Painting with a broad brush, you can conjure up images of the lone wolf, a “cowboy coder” who writes messy, unmaintainable code, disregards the team, and leaves a trail of technical debt in their wake. Nowadays, the narrative is that these developers are brilliant but reckless, a short-term gain for a long-term, high-interest loan you’ll be paying off for years. Or more often, people believe that it’s just hype and that the rockstar doesn’t exist, or is a liar.

You Aren't Gonna Need The Chaos Monkey

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago, Netflix, in a brilliant move of engineering resilience, created a tool that would deliberately and randomly shut down their own production servers, create havok in their network, and otherwise try to destabilize their infrastructure. The idea was simple, yet profound: if you know chaos is coming, you’re forced to build systems that can withstand it. They wrote a blog post about it, released the open-source code, and almost overnight, a new legend was born in the tech world.

Do You Need To Streamline Your Software?

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Your wife has a dream…

She wants to move to the country, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. After all, your kids need trees to climb, grass to roll around in, and dirt to throw in each other’s eyes.

You study Zillow like a textbook before a final exam. Finally, you find the perfect property: a three bedroom, two bath house on an acre of land. Offer made, offer accepted.