I'm not an engineer, but I ask the right questions
Based on the stuff that we've built, based on the stuff I've now learned: GitHub and versioning, all those sorts of things. I always had an idea of what it was about, but it always just felt like there's just so much going on in here, I'm just going to focus on my business. But I've learned so much in the last six weeks that I'm pretty sure the engineers that we're working with that are junior probably think I am an engineer.
But bro, I am not. Well, not in the sense that they are. It's just that I'm very curious. I'm very inquisitive, and I ask the right questions, and I just go down rabbit holes that help me. I think of things from first principles. So even if I don't know what something is called, I can get a sense of what it should look like.
I took over the engineering team. They were just pushing code anyhow. And I'm like: look, you push code and then everything breaks. We need to be testing. But you're only testing on your localhost, and when you get into the web, things change. So can we just create an actual staging branch that everybody can test with the URL, versus you only testing on your local computer?
Said out loud on Sensemaking with Wolé & Tobi, Episode 103, “Are We Falling Out of Love With Social Media?”, released 8 December 2025. Trimmed for filler; not rewritten.