About
I’m Chandler Thompson, an engineering leader and coach. This is my personal blog. I write about the craft of leading engineering teams and the leadership-and-coaching crossover where the soft stuff meets the engineering brain — and, because I actually use them, the tools underneath: dev tooling and dotfiles, local AI that runs on my own machine, a home-lab Raspberry Pi doing more jobs than it should, and the note systems that survived a year instead of a YouTube weekend.
The throughline, if there is one: I like building systems and I like helping people, and somewhere along the way those stopped feeling like two different jobs. Leading teams taught me that the hardest problems are rarely the technical ones. Coaching taught me why. Running the occasional tabletop game has taught me more about facilitation than most management books, and training for my first half marathon taught me a surprising amount about shipping software.
On the engineering side I’m most comfortable in Python, with plenty of JavaScript and a grab-bag of other languages behind me and a bit of Go, plus the usual infrastructure around them. On the people side I lean on the practical end of coaching: The Coaching Habit, Clean Language, Motivational Interviewing. Some of what transfers to engineering ends up in the TILs here. I’ve stopped pretending the two halves are as separate as the job titles make them sound.
Posts here read like notes from someone who built the thing, because that’s what they are. If something I wrote helped, or you think I got it wrong, I’d like to hear about it.