Eric Merritt

Eric Merritt

Seattle, WA
CTO and engineering leader. Self-taught from books. Co-author of Erlang and OTP in Action. Creator of the Dao of Delivery. Writes at The Desk Reference.
26
Nov
The Coming PR Tsunami

The Coming PR Tsunami

LLMs broke the code production bottleneck, and now review is the constraint. The fix: small atomic PRs, LLM-generated summaries that compress comprehension time, and engineer-owned calibration. Teams that adapt stay ahead. Teams that wait drown in their own queues.
3 min read
18
Nov
The Pass: Agentic Engineering

The Pass: Agentic Engineering

You are no longer the line cook. You are the executive chef at the pass, directing agents who compile, test, and retry at high speed. You may not type a single line of code, but you remain accountable for all of it. Your value shifts from labor to leadership.
6 min read
05
Sep
The Value of Frustration: Your Untapped Guide to Improvement

The Value of Frustration: Your Untapped Guide to Improvement

Frustration isn't just a roadblock—it's an untapped metric for improvement. It often serves as the sole indicator of issues in complex systems. By practicing monitoring and employing second-order thinking, you can transform this emotion into a metric for personal and organizational betterment.
6 min read
06
Mar
Doctests for Ocaml

Doctests for Ocaml

You can test in the small, validate the code in your documentation, encourage testing, and get better documentation by leveraging MDX, a doctest-like tool for OCaml.
3 min read
29
Oct
Coding is a bad habit

Coding is a bad habit

Don't fall back on your engineering skills when you face challenges. You can't code your way out of organizational issues.
4 min read
22
Nov
Magic in the Mundane: Compounding Interest For Organizations

Magic in the Mundane: Compounding Interest For Organizations

There is magic in mundane processes applied with discipline. Use RCAs and processes to massively improve your world.
7 min read
08
Feb
Productivity Plow, Clear a Path to Success

Productivity Plow, Clear a Path to Success

Organizations build out teams around 'Engineering Productivity.' It takes fundamental changes to the organization's structure and a management to improve productivity.
8 min read
04
Dec
Get Your Teams to Estimate Well

Get Your Teams to Estimate Well

Technologists hate estimating. They know that any estimate they give is wrong, and that makes the team look bad. That is our fault. We ask the team to provide us with estimates that are both precise and accurate.
8 min read
23
Nov
Set up Your Engineering Teams for Success

Set up Your Engineering Teams for Success

Organizations need to be comprised of agile, autonomous teams that can deliver with minimal coordination with other teams. Those teams must plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress in service of a specific set of projects and services.
8 min read
16
Nov
Happy People Know What's Going On

Happy People Know What's Going On

You must communicate change for it to be effective. Randomly mentioning it to a direct is not enough. Learn to communicate change effectively with low overhead.
6 min read