The manifesto
I'm Dudi. I run R&D the chill way.
I'm an R&D manager. I've led platform, backend, and applied-AI teams through hypergrowth, outages, pivots, and at least one incident involving a rug (metaphorical). This blog is my lab notebook.
Currently
Leading R&D, hiring seniors, placing AI bets
Before
Backend & platform eng, startups & scale-ups
Off-lane
Bowling (bad), espresso (good), rugs (tied)
What I believe
1. Calm is engineered, not gifted. Psychological safety, clear ownership, and honest SLOs do more for velocity than any heroics.
2. Boring tech where it counts, bold bets where it matters. Your deploy pipeline should be dull. Your prototypes should be spicy — and timeboxed.
3. Manage the lane, not the roll. Tell great engineers where the pins are, oil the lane, then get out of the way.
4. Write it down. Decisions, kill criteria, postmortems without blame. Memory is a leaky abstraction.
“Strike out ego, spare the team.” — taped above my monitor, next to a photo of a rug that really tied a room together.
What you'll find here
- Calm Leadership — 1:1s, feedback, hiring, on-call without dread
- Architecture that Abides — platform thinking, contracts, boring reliability
- R&D Bets & AI — spikes, evals, and bringing research to prod
Want to talk? I like short emails, long coffees, and teams that take weekends off.
Find me around:
— Dudi abides ☕🎳