Gareth Clubb

The six books I keep returning to after seven years as an engineering manager. What each one taught me and why they still matter.

Shape Up promises uninterrupted delivery cycles, real cooldowns and a healthier relationship with backlogs. Rolling it out in an established organisation is harder than it looks. The parts that have worked, the parts that fight back and what I am still figuring out.

A mentee of mine applied to over 400 roles and got 10 interviews. No constructive feedback from any of them. The graduate software engineering pipeline is broken and the industry is not paying attention.

Shared code was never about DRY. It was about consistency. But shared implementations are not the only way to achieve it. A look at why shared abstractions break at scale, what AI changes about the cost of duplication and why reusing knowledge matters more than reusing code.