Notes from the chair.

Stepping into a CTO role without a clear playbook can be overwhelming. Most new CTO's focus on completely the wrong things. Here’s what actually matters in your first 90 days — and what doesn’t.

Managing and steering your AI development team mates still requires deep engineering skills, but therein lies a future paradox - how will new engineers gain those skills in the first place?

After 30 years in the industry, 14 of which I've spent scaling a large scale enterprise app through to acquisition, today I've left it all behind. Am I crazy?

Technical debt is inevitable, but most teams misunderstand what it actually is and how to manage it. The real problem isn’t debt itself — it’s pretending it doesn’t exist.

Culture isn't dictated, it's organic, it's grown, and it's tended and curated. Your first 5 engineers will define your culture, so you need to get it right.

The role of the developer has changed. AI has made the role unrecognisable from even 12 months ago. Start-ups need to embrace the future to thrive and, if you're a developer you need to evolve or change careers!

We've seen the headlines of mass layoffs in engineering due to AI optimisation, but is it true or a convenient cover. What does the jobs market look like for engineers in 2026-2027?