Blog Post Ideas
Next Post (Target: ~May 21-22, 2026)
“How a Daily Email Became Our Monitoring Strategy”
Story from Vote.org (2017-2019)
The Story:
- Started setting up a cronjob to email myself at end of day tracking app usage
- Monitored: who started an action, who completed it, looking for trends
- Just sent it to myself initially
- Other engineers wanted to be added
- Ops person wanted it
- CEO wanted it
- Became clear we needed better monitoring tools
- Started investing in proper dashboards (Geckoboards)
The Lesson:
- Start with the simplest thing that could work
- Let organic demand prove the need
- Use scrappy solutions to justify real investment
- Best features often start as hacks you build for yourself
- How engineering culture and tooling evolve organically
Alternative titles:
- “The Best Feature Starts as a Hack for Yourself”
- “From Cronjobs to Dashboards: How Good Observability Grows”
Tone: Reflection piece - “Here’s something that happened years ago that taught me [lesson]”
Other Ideas (Brainstormed)
Interviewing
- “What I Look for When Interviewing Senior Engineers (Hint: It’s Not Algorithms)”
- “The Best Interview Question I’ve Ever Been Asked”
- “How to Tell a Good Engineering Story in Interviews”
- “Red Flags I Watch for as an Interviewer”
Leadership & Mentorship
- “Code Review is a Conversation, Not a Critique”
- “What Improv Taught Me About Pair Programming”
- “The Most Important Thing I Learned About Mentoring”
- “How to Give Feedback That Actually Helps”
Career & Culture
- “14 Years In: What I Wish I’d Known as a Junior Engineer”
- “From Flight Simulators to Web Apps: Why Career Pivots Are Worth It”
- “How I Helped Start a Women’s ERG (And What I’d Do Differently)”
- “Building Team Culture Remotely: Games, Rituals, and Real Connection”
- “When to Leave a Job (And When to Stay)”
Imposter Syndrome & Growth
- “The Day I Realized I’m Actually a Senior Engineer”
- “Everyone Googles Basic Syntax (Yes, Even After 14 Years)”
- “What ‘Senior’ Actually Means”
Tech-Adjacent
- “My Debugging Process: A Detective Story”
- “The Production Bug That Taught Me [X]”
- “Why I Keep Coming Back to Rails”
- “Things I’ve Learned to Just Write Down (Because I’ll Never Remember)”