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We sit down with veteran Principal Engineer Justin Abrahms to discuss why having a clear engineering scoreboard is critical to winning the software delivery game. Drawing on his experience scaling deployment pipelines for payment engineers, platform engineering teams, and globocorps, Justin explains the simple truth: when you deliberately do the right things—embracing continuous delivery, small batch sizes, and tight feedback loops—you get the right outcomes. Yet despite these battle-tested practices existing for decades, our industry suffers from an "Eternal September" fueled by terrible onramps.
We dissect the performative theater of modern engineering, taking aim at the severe lack of intentionality in code reviews. Too many peer reviews devolve into superficial nitpicking rather than educational, inquisitive assessments of long-term maintainability. Justin shares lessons learned from working alongside Trevor Foucher (author of The Art of Readable Code) at Google, demonstrating how high-signal code reviews should actively educate developers and de-risk downstream systems before code ever hits production.
Finally, we confront the reality that raw development speed is profoundly addictive. Teams chase the immediate dopamine hit of generating code faster with LLMs, ignoring what happens when they look just one week or one month out and realize unmaintainable prototypes instantly collapse under the weight of real customer changes
💡 Notable Links: Book: The Psychology of Software Teams Short: Rory Sutherland — Slow is safer and better 🎯 Picks: Warren - Malicious domain names research Justin - Deadworld Isekai