I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and a recent Root Cause podcast conversation pushed me to finally write it down. In the podcast they talking about something that I suspect a lot of engineers feel but rarely say out loud: you might only need deep system knowledge 1% of the time, but that 1% is often the moment that matters most. And AI is quietly eroding exactly that.

I was reading The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead and had some loud thoughts I want to share.

In my previous post, I wrote about how I approached onboarding after moving from Identity and Access to Synthetic Monitoring and Session Replay. One of the most useful things I did during that onboarding was build a small playground and use it to walk the DEM lifecycle end to end.

At Grafana Labs, we don’t just support internal mobility, we actively encourage it. So here’s some long-overdue news: after five years supporting the Identity and Access team, I’ve moved to lead the Synthetic Monitoring and Session Replay squads.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about personal growth and, in the process, realized something important: there have always been periods in my career where I wasn’t growing. Sometimes I understood it too late. Other times, the lack of growth resulted in stagnation that ultimately harmed my team, my family, and the business.