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, AI put to work on real engineering problems, 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 day job is platforms behind consumer businesses: carts and checkout, payments both one-off and subscription, marketplaces, marketing and lifecycle messaging, identity and access. Earlier that meant growing a startup’s engineering from a single engineer into the entire function, reporting to the CEO, with commerce, marketing, data, and infrastructure all under one roof. I’ve hired a lot of engineers and grown several of them into senior, staff, and manager roles, and that part has aged better than any architecture I’ve drawn.
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.
I’ve also spent about a decade doing the public-facing half of technical work: live seminars, on-camera product storytelling, town halls, executive reviews. Explaining why a platform matters and then going and building it are the same skill wearing different clothes, and I’d rather do both than pick.
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.