Camille Fournier

politics

As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle. But many leaders are neglecting to address how their teams should work with AI i…

Several years ago, I published a critique of manager READMEs that succeeded in stirring up a lot of feelings, pro and con. I’d like to believe it prompted some people to reconsider whether these are actually effective t…

I’m working on a talk about rewriting platforms for LDX3 later this month. Spoiler alert: a lot of the talk centers around why rewriting platforms is usually a very bad idea. For more on that you can read the rearchitec…

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” — Eliel Saarinen Frequently we will be given problems…

design

Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surp…

product managementinfrastructure

Software engineers are attracted to formulas, algorithms, and structures. As people whose job it is to take ideas and turn them into predictable executable code, it is unsurprising that we’re drawn to ways of thinking t…

For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond. How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it How to write a design doc, take fe…

design

 originally posted on LeadDev.com One of the most stressful parts of the end-of-year process for managers is the dreaded performance rating. This process forces you to boil down all of the work that a person did ov…

management

You’re probably familiar with the concept of Choose Boring Technology. If you’re not, I’ll wait for you to read the excellent blog post by Dan McKinley that inspired a much-needed correction in tech to balance “innovati…

  This tweet got me thinking about change, and how software engineers (and especially, Platform teams) can drive cultural change throughout companies. First, let’s take the question. You want to change the engineer…

Have you ever worked on a team that felt like it was just stuck in a rut? Somehow things were always just one fix away from improving: the next project, the next quarter, the next hire, this would turn the situation aro…

For the past 3 years, I have been running a platform engineering organization. Since that term is vague, where I work it means the software side of infrastructure. Compute platforms like kubernetes, storage systems, sof…

infrastructure

A hard lesson for me over the past several years of my career has been figuring out how to pick my battles. I’ve seen many friends and colleagues struggle with this as well: how do you know when to involve yourself in s…

I got feisty on twitter this week and wrote up some tweets on manager READMEs, a recent hot trend in management. Let’s break them down: Dropping f-bombs is one of my "quirks" Well, what can I say, I’m sick of this trend…

When I wrote “The Manager’s Path” I talked about what it means to work at the various levels of leadership, but I didn’t really talk as much about how you actually climb to those levels. For some people, it just happens…

management

I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that involves “well, she’s good at X, and he’s good at Y, and then there’s Z…” Every manag…

management

Effective delegation is one of the most critical skills a manager can learn. Without effective delegation, you fall victim to micromanaging your team, losing control of your time, and eventually failing to put yourself…

Alignment, in the teamwork sense, means “a position of agreement or alliance.” It is one of the critical qualities that determines success in an organization, particularly at higher levels. Many individual contributors…

AI alignment