I'm a Staff Engineer at Medium, the home for human writing on the internet. I also write, edit, and read here, so most days I'm building for people like me. For most of this year I've also had a second job: interim engineering manager for my team, on top of the Staff-level IC work and leading the web guild.
back from paternity leave on a Monday. manager by Tuesday. →01Two jobs at once
When our engineering manager left, I picked up the role for five senior engineers straight off paternity leave, with almost no ramp time. I rebuilt our sprint ceremonies, ran retros that actually followed through, and moved the team from counting output to measuring impact. When story points started to feel like overhead, I swapped them for plain-language sprint goals. Every sprint ended with shout-outs that named people and what they did.
Most of the job was coaching. With one engineer, that meant helping them think past the ticket toward how their work could multiply everyone else's. With another, it meant making their work visible, both by pushing them to share it early and by recognizing it publicly. Sometimes it just meant reminding someone that they were doing a great job, often enough that they started to believe it.
“Scott not only took over [the team] as interim manager, he leveled it up in the process, all while taking on web guild leadership and executing as a staff SWE.”
02Leading the web guild
As Web Guild Lead, I go after the problems that make every future change cheaper. One of web's biggest pain points is keeping the design system and the code in sync, so I drove the first Figma Code Connect link between the two. I also wrote the proposal to migrate our styling from Fela to Tailwind and opened it up for the whole team to weigh in. And I helped engineers turn their own ideas into guild projects with room to happen, like dark mode.
I also treat performance as user experience. I built Medium's first real-user monitoring dashboard in Datadog. For the first time, it breaks Core Web Vitals and latency down by page type, and it's now how the web team checks whether the product actually feels fast. Sometimes the fix is tiny: four characters of HTML cut image download sizes across the site.
03Still shipping
I kept writing code the whole time. I built the front end of the Editor Partner Program, which pays publication editors for their editorial work, including per-post earnings dashboards and status pages. Then I organized a workshop between Engineering, Content, Trust & Safety, and Design on making editors' lives easier, and shipped what came out of it: bulk block and decline, off-topic tags, decline reasons, and focal-point control for featured images on every post. I also took down submissions for an hour along the way. The whole story is in my post on what we built for editors.
“He is the kind of manager who makes you better without you realizing it's happening.”