Narrow Front Door, Visible Back Rooms
Going fractional? Get in the door with one narrow problem, then make the rest of your work easy to find, because the engineers who find you pull you into more.
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Posts tagged staff engineer
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Posts tagged staff engineer
The Career I Built on Work Nobody Wanted
A career built on the audits, migrations, and offshore coordination nobody volunteered for, because that work maps a company fastest.
A Professional Owns the Whole Outcome
Professionalism in software is owning the whole outcome: the cost, the failure, the 3am page, the wrong call. Process and titles don't cover it.
How I Prompt Claude as a Staff Engineer (50 Prompts I Actually Use)
Fifty prompts I use to ship production AI features, debug distributed systems, and write docs that don't rot. Code review, debugging, refactoring, system design, and PR-quality writing, with five full examples.
How I'd Hire a Staff Engineer at an AI Startup
The title 'Staff Engineer' means three different things at three different companies. At an AI startup pre-Series-A, only one of those three is what you actually need. The screen, the take-home, the interview loop, and the AI-fluency calibration that's now table stakes.
How I Triage a New Codebase in 90 Minutes
A fractional engineering engagement starts with a codebase you've never seen. You have ninety minutes to form a useful POV before the kickoff call. The seven-step triage I run, the two questions I bring back to the founder, and how AI tooling has accelerated the process.