It’s all a bit weird at the moment. LLMs can whip up polished prose at an industrial scale. Everyone on LinkedIn looks fluent. Everyone sounds authoritative. It’s impossible to tell who actually knows what they are talking about, but it’s 100% certain that not everyone does.
In that world, authenticity isn’t a brand strategy.It’s how you signal: there’s a real human here.
So I’m going to waffle on here and release stuff early, and then you’ll know that no machine could generate this level of nonsense! I didn’t say it would be good, but it will be authentic.Writing is not just a way to publish thoughts - it’s the way to discover them - especially on Substack..Publishing drafts, fragments, and half-formed ideas creates a visible trail of reasoning that can’t be faked or remixed by an algorithm.
Thinking in public is how you stay readable in an age of fluent fakery.
And for me, this newsletter is also something else:It’s the workshop floor where I’m building my next book.
Not behind closed doors.Not as a big reveal.But here - where the shaping of ideas is visible and collaborative.
The book
This newsletter will track and influence the themes of the book:
What a platform really is, beyond tooling and Kubernetes.
How organisational design, Team Topologies, and SRE change how platforms should be built.
Why cognitive load—not technology—is the primary constraint.
How empathy, inclusion, and psychological safety shape sustainable engineering.
What “platform as a product” means when you take it seriously.
What resilience looks like when you place teams - not infrastructure - at the centre.
The book is a field guide for building humane, reliable, reality-aligned engineering organisations. And Engineering For Teams is where I’ll explore the raw materials that the book is made from.
Some posts will be prototypes of arguments.Some will be deleted scenes.Some will be sketches that later become actual chapters.Some of my thoughts will be based on other people’s work.All of them will be real thinking.
The point isn’t to be polished.The point is to be honest.
Why this matters now
In an era where machines can generate output, what actually matters is the direction of travel.
People don’t follow you because of perfect posts.They follow because they can see how you think - how you get from question to insight, from confusion to structure, which is ideal for me. After all, I’m very much at home in the chaos.
Thinking in public creates a visible trail of thinking.This is work at human speed, with human texture.
An invitation
You’re invited to think with me.
To question, extend, disagree, or reshape the ideas as they emerge.To be part of the feedback loop that sharpens the book as it grows.
If something feels unfinished, that’s intentional.We’re building this in the open.
Thanks for joining at the beginning.Let’s make something real together.
—Mark