Engineering, Empathy, and Why I Started This Blog
Why I started writing about engineering leadership, team culture, and kindness in software teams.
I spent a long time thinking before starting to write here.
Not because I lacked things to say. But because I wanted to be clear on why. Writing just to write is noise. There is enough of that already.
So here is the honest version.
Who I am and what I do
I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Teads, an advertising technology company building an end-to-end platform for advertisers and premium publishers. I lead engineering across the Core Performance domain - campaign management, performance optimization infrastructure, dynamic product ads, and CTV. Part of my current focus is driving the unification between Teads Ad Manager and Outbrain, which is as complex and interesting as it sounds.
Before moving into management, I spent close to a decade doing iOS development - e-commerce, consumer apps, mobile SDKs, the kind of work where you quickly learn that performance and reliability are not optional. That technical background shapes how I manage. I still care deeply about the craft.
I also mentor students at OpenClassrooms, which is one of the things I enjoy most. Teaching forces you to understand things properly. You cannot bluff your way through an explanation to someone who is genuinely trying to learn.
Why this blog
The real answer is simple: I have always loved writing.
A decade ago I was writing articles for print magazines about software engineering. Before that, I kept blogs and wrote regularly for most of my twenties. Then life changed shape - three kids, a shift from hands-on engineering to management, more responsibility, less spare space - and writing quietly fell away. Not a deliberate decision. Just something that stopped happening.
Starting this is, in part, picking that back up.
The other reasons are more practical. I think about engineering leadership and team dynamics constantly, and I have no good place to put it. I have opinions on how teams grow and how they break, on code review culture, on AI and what it actually changes versus what it just makes louder, on the gap between senior engineers and first-time leaders. I talk about these things in 1-on-1s, in Slack threads, in mentoring sessions. Writing forces a different kind of precision - a half-formed idea can survive a conversation, but it does not survive being typed out.
What to expect
Most posts will sit at the intersection of engineering craft and the human dynamics that surround it:
- How teams actually work - how trust is built, how mistakes get handled, how culture forms without anyone noticing
- Engineering management in practice: the decisions, the tradeoffs, and the things nobody tells you before you take the job
- AI: what is genuinely changing in how we build and ship software, and what is just hype dressed up in a press release
- Technical depth when it earns its place - architecture decisions, mobile and performance topics, patterns I have learned from shipping real products at scale
- Career growth, especially the IC-to-lead transition I have watched happen many times
I will not write motivational content. I do not think inspiration scales. What I will try to write is concrete enough to be useful - things you can actually apply, or at least disagree with specifically.
On kindness
One more thing, because I think it is the most important and the most underrated: software teams work better when people are kind to each other. Not nice - kind. There is a real difference.
Nice is avoiding the hard conversation. Kind is having it in a way that respects the person on the other side.
That sounds obvious. In practice it is rare. I have seen technically excellent teams break down because nobody had the courage to be honest, or because honest became synonymous with brutal. Getting that balance right - staying direct without becoming cold - is something I think about a lot, and it threads through most of what I plan to write here.
That is the premise. Let’s see where it goes.