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The CTO's Truth Detector
The Meeting Where Everything Looked Perfect (But Wasn't). How the CTO Ratio saved my *$$ from a sinking ship.
Sep 1
•
Etienne de Bruin
5
August 2025
The CTO's Branch Nightmare
Why Your 120-Person Engineering Team Spends 40% of Its Time Managing Branches Instead of Shipping Code
Aug 14
•
Etienne de Bruin
4
Establishing Codebase Standards: The Foundation Your 100-Person Engineering Team Desperately Needs
The Brutal Reality of Codebase Chaos
Aug 10
•
Etienne de Bruin
6
The CTO's Operational Blueprint
I'm sitting across from Sarah, our newly hired Director of Engineering, and she's asking me questions I should have answers to. It's her third day.
Aug 6
•
Etienne de Bruin
6
July 2025
You’ve got 40 engineers and a real budget, why are you still leading like it’s 12 people and a whiteboard?
The Real Reason You're Feeling Buried and Edge of Burnout Might Be Because You Haven’t Upgraded Yourself to Match the Scale of Your Company
Jul 30
•
Etienne de Bruin
3
The CTO's Signal Management
Signals are flowing through your organization right now. Which ones are you amplifying, and which are you letting drown in the noise?
Jul 16
•
Etienne de Bruin
3
Meta's $200 Million Gamble on One Engineer Is Everything Wrong with Big Tech
Why throwing money at individual "geniuses" is the worst way to build artificial general intelligence
Jul 11
•
Etienne de Bruin
1
June 2025
When Did You Stop Building for Joy?
Why Your Next Side Project Should Solve Exactly One Person's Problem: Yours
Jun 29
•
Etienne de Bruin
The CTO's Drowning Team
When Your Star Developer Takes Three Weeks to Ship a Button
Jun 26
•
Etienne de Bruin
3
The CTO's Visibility Temptation
Why your next promotion depends on becoming professionally invisible
Jun 18
•
Etienne de Bruin
1
1
When Ego-Driven Leadership Holds Your Infrastructure Hostage
The very expensive temper tantrum
Jun 15
•
Etienne de Bruin
Big Tech’s Nuclear Play
The Real Story Nobody’s Telling You About AI’s Dirty Little Secret
Jun 11
•
Etienne de Bruin
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