I'm a nerd.

In the past 30 years we've seen a shift in companies being led by dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the nerds. Most boards and advisors helping these companies have financial and dealmaker backgrounds. My focus is to help the technician led companies with mentoring from a fellow nerd who's built companies, products, and platforms at scale... while having fun!

It's time to build.

# cat good-eng-quote.txt

Scientists study the world as it is;

Engineers create the world that has never been.

—Theodore von Karman

Book

My writing is meant to shine a light on patterns that appear in all our companies and technical teams, dig into the nuances, and leave you with concrete tools for building better teams. I hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: The Problem upgrade chart. How do you handle/manage the stress of working in a hyper-growth company where there's always too much to do?
Chapter 2: Platform investments. How much of your r&d spend should be focused on platform work?
Chapter 3: Layerinitis. What virus infects growing engineering orgs the most?
Chapter 4: Alignment > Autonomy. What's the worst leadership advice you've ever heard?
Chapter 5: Going fast slowly. We are getting slower as we scale, how can we get back to being fast?
Chapter 6: Problem solving vs problem planning. How should product and engineering work together and plan work?
Chapter next: Coming soonish when inspiration hits...

I have a love hate relationship with writing. I co-wrote a book in 2005 and we updated and released a 2nd edition in 2010. It was both painful and one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. At the time my kids were aged 1 and 3 so the timing was very suboptimal. I swore, never again.

Fast forward almost two decades and the kids are away and time has returned. Writing is possible again without the pressure of a deadline. Writing is fun again!

About

Hi, nice to meet you. My name is Jean-Michel. I've worked in tech for 30 years, building software and then building teams and companies.

I'm a software developer and have built and led teams of 1 to 3,000. I was a founding member on the Eclipse platform and open source team, and then led and scaled the engineering orgs at Atlassian and Shopify from hundreds to thousands of developers.

Community and education are big passions and co-founded Canadian Tech @ Scale which brings together tech leaders from across Canada and founded DevDegree.ca which is an accrediated work-integrated computer science degree unlike any other.

Outside of writing, I'm also working as an LP and advisor with Generation IM and advisor/board with a few companies: BuildKite, AlayaCare, OpsLevel, Search.io, Omaze, BenchSci, Avant Art, Govalo.

I'm highly influenced by the book Drawing from the right side of the brain. While drawing was never my profession, learning to draw helped me see things that others around me often didn't see. The book was also an inspiration for the name of my website.

Here are some recent interviews and talks that can help you get to know me:

🎥 TeamGage with Ben Smith: Why getting alignment on teams is so hard (2022 - 45m)
🎙 Project to Product with Mik Kirsten: What I've learned leading engineering teams (2022 - 1h)
📝 New York Times - Welcome to the bot wars (2021)
🎥 Bot Devevelopers confront @jmwind (2021 - 1h11m)
🎥 Shopify: How we get shit done (2020 - 20m)
🎙 Supermanagers: Building a Connected Network of Brains (2019 - 42m)
🎥 An insiders look at the technology that powers Shopify (2020 - 32m)
📝 DevDegree: A big bet on software education (2018)
📝 Financial Times: Devdegree accelerates university co-op learning (2018)
🎥 Leading your teams with maps (2017 - 35m)
📝 Globe and Mail: How to sustain Canadas brain drain (2018)
📝 Globe and Mail: For tech workers its about more than money (2018)
🎙 Alphalist podcast: Building software at scale (2019 - 1h20m)
🎙 ModernCTO: Building a product centered culture (2018 - 55m)
🎥 dotScale: Extensibility as a Product (2014)