Senior Software Architect · FAANG
I'm a senior engineer at a FAANG company, new dad the rest of the time. I write about thinking with whiteboards — at work, at home, and lately at 2am in the kitchen.
I've been carrying this whiteboard notebook in my laptop bag for eight months. It's not a replacement for the wall. It's something different — and I didn't expect to like it as much as I do.
Read →My wife and I have very different thinking styles. She thinks in conversations, I think in diagrams. The board is where those two modes can actually meet.
Read →Most engineers have been trained to only speak when they have a complete thought. That's exactly backwards for collaborative problem solving, and the whiteboard is how I try to change it.
Read →When the office closed I lost the big shared board on the wall. I spent two years trying to replace it with screen-sharing and digital tools. Then I put a board in my home office.
Read →I thought whiteboards were a work thing. A tech-office thing. My wife, who is not an engineer and has never worked in an office with a whiteboard wall, is the reason I have one in the kitchen.
Read →Every year I try to go fully digital. I set up the perfect system — the right app, the right workflow, the right integrations. And every year, about two weeks in, I'm back at the board.
Read →Our daughter was three weeks old. I was half asleep in the kitchen and I found myself sketching a feeding schedule on the back of a grocery receipt. My wife said I could just use my phone. I didn't have a good answer.
Read →I've tried every productivity system. Notion, Linear, Obsidian, plain text files. None of them work the way a marker on a clean surface does. Here's what I've figured out about why.
Read →The thing I've had to learn is that erasing is not loss. It's the opposite. Here's what I mean.
Tech moves fast and rewards fast answers. I've come to believe this is a trap, and the board is part of how I avoid it.
It started because I kept forgetting olive oil. Two years later the board in our kitchen manages our finances, our social calendar, and our ongoing list of things we want to do before we're forty.
I don't know the neuroscience and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I know is that I think differently on my feet than I do in a chair. The board gets me on my feet.
Task apps are optimized for completion. Personal goals are optimized for direction. Those are different things and they need different tools.
I wanted a place to capture the thoughts that come right before sleep and right after waking up. My wife had some reasonable objections. We found a compromise.
She was fourteen months old and she grabbed the marker before I could stop her. She drew a line. She looked at me. I looked at her. Then we drew together for an hour.
I used to have sections and categories and color codes on the board. Now I just write things. It works better.
Digital tools make it easy to produce notes that look finished. Finished-looking notes are the enemy of actual thinking. Here's what I mean.
Every design doc I've written in the last three years started as a board session. The docs got better when I started doing this, and I think I know why.
A full board is either a sign that you've been productive or a sign that you've been avoiding decisions. Learning to tell the difference took me a while.
I don't have a morning routine. I have a morning habit: I look at the board before I look at anything else. It takes five minutes and it changes how the day goes.
The board in my office is visible to anyone who walks in. Most of what's on it is unfinished. That used to embarrass me. Now I think it's one of the most useful things about it.
Being on-call means holding a lot of incomplete information in your head at once. The board is where I put it so my head doesn't have to.
Some problems don't get solved in one session at the board. They sit there for weeks, getting erased and redrawn, until one day something clicks. This is what that process actually looks like.
Every productivity system tells you to do a weekly review. Most people don't. I think the medium is part of the problem — here's the version I've actually kept up with.
For years I typed everything. Perfect notes, fully searchable, backed up to three places. I almost never went back to them. Here's what I do instead.
I used to think the hard part of running a household was doing the things. It isn't. The hard part is remembering what the things are. The board fixed that.
There is a specific kind of meeting where everyone is looking at a diagram on a screen and nobody is saying anything useful. I've been in hundreds of them. Here's what I do instead.