ai-goodies
General-purpose AI goodies worth keeping around — agent skills, prompts and documentation habits that survived contact with real work.
unhappy path | Software engineering hijinks
I lead cloud and data at Prisma Photonics — fiber sensing for critical infrastructure. Before that I ran engineering at Iterative (DVC, CML), and spent a long stretch on platform work at Iguazio and Intel.
Most of what I care about is unglamorous: cutting friction, clarifying ownership, and building systems teams can run without constant babysitting. Lately that includes figuring out where AI actually helps engineering work, and where it doesn't.
This site is for notes on those themes — systems, leadership, and the paths that don't go as planned.
Projects
A few things I've built or contributed to.
stateseparator
A quantum state separator: given an entangled state, find the closest separable one. C++ and Eigen under a small web front end, from Technion days.
coding-tasks
Standalone coding tasks for interviewing engineers across levels — cherry-picked to be small, honest, and actually indicative of the job.
pmp-examples
Project-management templates and examples for engineering teams — the artifacts that turned out to be worth reusing.
dockerfiles
Assorted Dockerfiles kept in one place, so the next time I need one I am not rewriting it from memory.
Notes
Timeless notes on engineering, systems, and leadership.
Staff archetypes in the age of agentic engineering
Agentic tools are quietly reshaping which Staff-plus shapes thrive. Solvers are winning the incentive game; Tech Leads and Architects are getting squeezed — and that trade-off will show up in the talent mix for years.
Fun Links
Tools
- thefuck — it’s ok to be mad when you typo. This terminal cli helps catch and correct simple command typos.
Deep Dives
- Staff archetypes — Will Larson’s Tech Lead / Architect / Solver / Right Hand map; useful when “staff engineer” is doing too much work as one title.
- Falsehoods programmers believe about time — TODO(oded): example item. The good ones are the ones that changed how you work.
Misc
- Behold, the Product Management Prioritization Menagerie — HiPPO, RHiNO, ZEbRA, WoLF, and seagulls: a field guide to the animals that eat your backlog.
- Wat — TODO(oded): example item. Still funny.