The traditional image of a tech leader often involves someone who’s “graduated” from coding—someone who’s moved beyond the keyboard to focus purely on strategy, meetings, and high-level decision making. But in 2025, this approach isn’t just outdated; it’s counterproductive.

Getting consensus on design decisions is one of the most challenging aspects of any technical or creative project. Too often, teams find themselves caught between two extremes: the chaotic free-for-all of design by committee, or the risky isolation of the lone wolf making decisions in a vacuum. But there’s a third way—one that comes from Japanese business philosophy and can revolutionize how we approach collaborative work.

The website you are reading was generated using Hugo. I recently upgraded the version of Hugo up quite a few releases.

Overall everything went smooth, but something I didn’t catch till the next day was all my audio embeds stopped working. The embedded html5 audio tag in the post or page was being ommited. It was getting rendered as an html comment, “raw HTML omitted.”

I heard good things about Amazon Polly and wanted to take a peek and judge for myself. It’s very easy to use. The example below were done with the AWS CLI.

In case you’re not familiar, Polly is a text to speech service created by Amazon for AWS. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

At work I selected GraphCMS to be our preferred headless CMS. It is already leveraged on multiple projects and has been working out well for us. The beauty of a good headless CMS is you can use in many scenarios. Case in point, of the 3 instances we have, 2 are web apps; only one is marketing site.

Cobra is a library and generation tool for creating command line interfaces. It simplifies the work needed to create a good CLI. It is written in Go and is used in quite a few well know open source projects. Docker, Kubernetes, Etcd and the GitHub CLI all use Cobra. Check out this link for a larger list of projects.