Let's Start!

Welcome to my engineering leadership blog. There are probably more than enough engineering leadership blogs on the vast internet, so why bother with creating another one?

This idea comes from two sources. First, since the internet arrived at my parents’ home around 1999-2000, I was always writing. I had multiple versions of my personal blog, where I fearlessly shared my view of the world and events around me. Coverage there involved many things, as one’s true-life would, it was really personal. However, on the one hand, it slowly died off as the age of social media has arrived. On the other - the contents were undoubtedly all over the place in terms of coherence, clarity, and even naivety. It’s a similar feeling when you are looking at the code you wrote 15 years ago - you would certainly have some nostalgic moments. Still, it’s unlikely you would consider putting it up as the reflection of today’s you.

Besides personal blog(s), there was a period where I was heavily contributing to heavy metal music’s press scene in Lithuania. I was a developer, journalist, and at some point even the chief editor of the 2nd largest metal music webzine here - Hell Music. Those were the days, where I was doing album reviews, news reporting, gigs’ commentary, interviews with bands. Again, relatively a lot of writing. At this point, I started noticing how writing helps me reflect, clarify, and sometimes even decide.

Second, my career as a software engineer shifted in some interesting ways - after coding for about 15 years, I have found myself very excited about leadership in engineering. Team Lead, Engineering Manager, and at the moment of writing this - Director of Engineering - are the roles I went through, where contributing to the codebase was less and less important and impactful. At the same time, I have learned tons and tons of leadership-related lessons. Mainly due to self-development, mentoring from others, making my own mistakes, and coaching others.

When coaching/mentoring others, I don’t just walk into the room and start talking. I have to prepare, analyze their personality, skills, and desires first. Then synthesize what I know into a package that is well structured and does not cut any essential aspects of the topic out. Well, mentorship is a fascinating topic on its own, which I will make sure to cover in this blog.

At this point, I realized that my writing experience, though distant, does help me. But it doesn’t feel as sharp as before. Moreover, it would be cool to have some form of well-prepared archive, so I could use it for my reference and share around when the need arises. Paired with my feeling that social media are just too noisy, naturally, the outcome of this thought process was the decision to kick-off brand new blog, focused on engineering leadership!

What This Blog Is

A collection of short essays related to engineering leadership topics. They are based purely on my own opinion and experience, so if you ever decide to apply those ideas in practice, be mindful of the context.

What This Blog Is Not

I’m not aiming to write posts that would be a guaranteed way to go in all situations. I might, and I will repeat topics that are covered in many other places. That’s okay - I do not claim I am the inventor or the first person ever walking this path.