About

Hi! I'm a software engineer (currently an engineering manager) living in the California Bay Area. I write about the ideas I've encountered that have helped me the most in my career. I try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of this site as high as I can, and I hope it helps you.

I support the Integrations team at Pachyderm, and I try coach my teammates using the same practical, mindset-oriented approach that I try to use in my essays. If you like these ideas, you can learn more about my management style from my manager readme. And we'd of course love for any interested engineers to come work with us! I can also be reached via email at the pachyderm.com domain with the username msteffen if you're just curious about what we do here (you know how software development workflows—testing, deployment, debugging/bisecting, rollbacks, auditing, etc—are all built around version control? We're trying to give data scientists and data engineers tools to work the same way with datasets and pipelines).