About me
Hi, I'm Michael Bleterman. I've spent more than twenty years building software and a good chunk of that building the teams that build it.
I came up the long way: developer, team lead, software architect and today an engineering director at a pre-IPO fintech, leading a team spread across several countries. Telecom, Video Analytics, FinTech. I've sat in most of the seats.
That's why this blog exists. I've been the engineer who just wanted to be left alone to code. I've been the architect holding a system together while the roadmap shifted underneath it. And I've been the manager in the room where the business calls get made. Engineers and business people usually want the same thing. They just don't speak the same language. I do, because I've been both.
Why this blog?
Engineers, product folks and business leaders are usually chasing the same goal. They describe it differently, measure it differently and lose each other in the gap between. Most expensive mistakes I've seen weren't technical failures - they were translation failures.
This blog is where I try to close that gap. It's a practitioner's blog, not a theory one: war stories from projects that went well and ones that didn't, plus honest post-mortems of the "how did we miss that" kind.
What you'll find here:
- Engineering and architecture from real systems, not whiteboard ideals
- Leadership and team management for people figuring it out without a manual
- Business and product thinking that actually lands with engineers
- The occasional strong opinion, loosely held
It's for engineering leaders, engineers who can see management coming and the product and business people who work with them. If you've watched a good team struggle for reasons that had nothing to do with talent, you're in the right place.