A working read of the EU AI Act for a small B2B startup building on a foundation model: provider versus deployer, the four risk tiers, and why the Aug 2, 2026 transparency deadline (Article 50) is a disclosure task, not a rebuild. Plus the Digital Omnibus delaying high-risk obligations to Dec 2027, the AI-literacy duty, and the open question of who owes end-user disclosure down a B2B chain.
When constant speed and firefighting stop being healthy in founder-led startups: how to tell what actually matters when everything feels urgent, how to spot the warning signs early, and when to reconsider staying.
A reconstructed conversation with an engineering manager who hesitates to hire a candidate sharper than himself, on the fear and ego behind hiring calls, and why hiring people stronger than you is the smarter move.
Borrowing “exponential back-off” from networking to handle communication overload as an engineering lead: how to triage the constant stream of Slack pings, reviews, and requests with informal priority classes and respond with intention.
How AI is reshaping engineering management: tracking impact instead of story points, budgeting for capacity instead of headcount, hiring abstraction thinkers, cutting dead process, and a 90-day pivot plan to stay relevant.
Recognizing and handling impostor syndrome in the moments it hits hardest, drawing on Aviv Ben-Yosef’s “The Tech Executive Operating System”, with techniques like asking yourself Socratic questions.
Practical, non-boring takeaways from NIST SP 800-190 for container security: image scanning and vulnerability management, controlled image provenance, least-privilege runtime restrictions, network segmentation, runtime threat detection, and host-OS hardening.
Why real human multitasking is hard: unlike computers, we lack an internal “orchestrator” to queue tasks, so things fall through the cracks, and how to restore that orchestrator given our finite mental RAM.
Three honest questions every individual contributor should answer before moving into engineering management: are you ready to work with people over computers, to let go of control, and to be driven by interruptions instead of a plan?
What a day as an engineering manager actually looks like, where the time goes, the challenges of 2024, and the time-management framework from Aviv Ben-Yosef’s “The Tech Executive Operating System” that helped.