I lead engineering teams in Silicon Valley. Fifteen years in tech, seven of them leading — production code, AI workflows, hiring, org design. I write and speak about the part nobody says out loud: most of us are better at the job than at anything else in our lives, and almost none of what the job taught us stays at the office.
There's a book coming. Working title: 17 to 1.
A stage, a newsletter, and a book. The book is still being written.
How engineering teams actually get built, and why AI adoption fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the tooling. For conferences and internal leadership events.
Every issue takes one thing I actually do at work — a postmortem, a piece of hard feedback, a hiring call — and shows where it works at home, and where it falls apart. Published on LinkedIn, archived here.
A memoir. Seventeen rules I learned running engineering teams, and what happened when I started using them at home — which is not the same as saying they worked.
I grew up on an unpaved street in southeast Ukraine with a corn field at the end of it. Most people born there stay there. At fourteen I won a regional competition, and the prize was a place at a selective lyceum an hour and a half away — which meant living with a host family, not with my mother. She said it was my call. I went.
That's the first hard call I remember making, and it's the one that led to every other one: a university, Kyiv, and eventually a job in Silicon Valley leading engineering teams. Fifteen years in tech and I'm good at that job. I'm good at deciding things with half the information I want, and telling people something they don't want to hear.
Then I'd close the laptop, walk into my own kitchen, and act like I'd never learned any of it. It took me years to see how stupid that was. That's what I write about.
Full issues go out on LinkedIn. They live here too, because a feed is a bad place to keep anything you might want to find again.
My kid used ChatGPT for homework and didn't tell me. What I did instead of taking the laptop away.
Adaptability becomes real when children watch an adult revise a plan without losing the plot.
The goal is not screen panic. The goal is agency around the technology.
Tell me the room and what you want people thinking about on the way out.