Derek Buckley

When a dev leads with “clean architecture,” I pause. If they push for the perfect setup before writing a single feature, I ask why? It’s not that quality doesn’t matter. It’s that context does. Perfect code doesn’t help if no one needs what you built.

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You don't need to hire a software farm for anything anymore. You need one developer who sits next to you for 6 weeks and learns how your business runs. Not how it looks in a deck. How it actually runs. The messy inbox system. The Notion doc nobody follows. The 4-step process your EA does manually every morning. A good AI developer, someone who works in n8n, Claude, and modern automation tools, turns that into systems that run without you. We placed one with a 12-person e-commerce brand. In 8 weeks he'd automated their order exception workflow, their influencer outreach follow-up, and their weekly reporting. The admin team is being trained in AI. Those that don’t adopt are gone. 3 tasks. Each one was eating 6-8 hours a week from someone on the team. That’s money in your pocket. 416h per year. That’s almost a full quarter's worth of work. A dev shop's savings don't matter if they can't ship. Ours do. I wrote more on this on more detail in the blog linked below: https://lnkd.in/gVpWJGZw DM me if you have been seeing AI happening in front of you and want to know how you can avoid missing out.

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A team member messaged me after a 4-hour call fixing dev issues. "I can't believe you were on that call." We have 100+ people at Genflow. I run a $100M agency. And I was right there debugging code with the team. It hit me how wrong most people get leadership. Everyone thinks being CEO means strategy sessions and vision boards. Wrong. Being CEO means being the captain who's still on the field. You show people how it's done by doing it alongside them. Not above them. The idea that you'll build a business and just work on "high-level stuff" while everyone else executes? That's not how you scale. You scale by staying close to the work. Understanding the actual problems. Building alongside your team. After 9 years of doing this, I've learned: The best CEOs aren't in corner offices. They're in the trenches when things break. They know the product inside out. They can still do the work if needed. Your team doesn't follow titles. They follow leaders who roll up their sleeves. What kind of leader are you trying to be?

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"Angular is becoming Razor Pages." That’s what my teammate told me today. He was referencing Angular’s new @if control flow syntax and jokingly predicted the death of *ngIf by Angular 21. He ended his argument with the classic hot take: "Dotnet >>> Angular." I had to remind him why we chose Angular for our frontend. While the syntax might look familiarly chaotic to backend developers right now, the behavior is strictly next-gen frontend architecture. We aren't dealing with server-side rendering that requires a clunky full page reload every time a user submits a form. Angular provides an ecosystem that delivers a seamless feel that older backend technologies struggled to achieve on their own: ✅ True SPA Experience: No flickering reloads. The app feels native and fluid. ✅ Signals & Zoneless: We are rapidly moving toward a world where change detection is surgical and incredibly performant. ✅ Enterprise Dependency Injection: A structured way to manage code that other frameworks are still trying to bolt on via third-party libraries. ✅ Deferrable Views: The built-in ability to prioritize exactly what loads when (@defer) is a massive win for Core Web Vitals. We can borrow helpful syntax ideas from the backend, but the User Experience is pure frontend magic. ✨ Are you Team Angular or Team .NET for modern web apps? #Angular #WebDevelopment #RazorPages #UI #SoftwareEngineering #DotNet #Frontend #TechDebate #JavaScript #TypeScript

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Stop wasting months on perfect automations. Build, launch, and learn in under a week: You want fast feedback. You need practical skills. The secret? Low-code automation. Most people overcomplicate this. They get stuck picking the “best” tool. They worry about custom code versus low-code platforms. Then months pass. No clients. No progress. Today’s coaching call with my client hammered this home: Both had strong software backgrounds. Both wanted to build AI automations. Both debated custom builds versus platforms like n8n or Make. They had a long list of ideas—receipt processors, email classifiers, language assistants. Instead of starting, they compared tool features, worried about hosting, and got lost in tech details. Here’s what worked: - Pick one low-code platform (n8n is my go-to for devs). - Use Airtable as your flexible data layer. Learn the basics, skip the headaches of Google Sheets. - Build direct—work left to right, node by node. Don’t plan every step. Don’t drop dozens of placeholders. - Test every node as you go. Manual triggers keep things real. - Launch ASAP to real users (even if it’s basic). - Learn from actual feedback—not guesswork. Why take this path? Because the longer you stay stuck comparing tools, the longer you wait for critical input from users and clients. Every day spent tweaking is a day you aren’t earning or improving. You avoid the classic stall-out that kills momentum for most automation agencies and solopreneurs. Start now: - Pick ONE idea on your list today. - Choose n8n and Airtable. - Build a basic flow in two hours. Don’t overthink. You’ll have something live—usable, testable, and ready for honest critique. Want faster progress? Stop optimizing and start executing. Feedback beats feature lists.

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They were whispering the answers off camera?!?! Let me explain... When selecting a software development sub-contractor or "development partner", how do you really know if they're any good? When hiring a developer as an employee, there will usually be a hands on element of the interview. Using this approach I've built exceptional in-house teams for clients, with resulting teams that benchmark at the top of the scale, let alone top of the industry (with the DORA Software Delivery Performance '4 keys' metrics – see: https://lnkd.in/eSf8zeAW ). Do you do the same with your suppliers/partners? If you don't, the resulting technical debt you inherit might not be apparent until long after the last of their invoices are paid and your in-house teams take over (seen this so many times)! Years ago, a client asked us to do such an evaluation. The supplier (a big name) was asked by our client to arrange for us to pair with the people that the supplier had in mind for the engagement. The results were shocking... Someone could be heard whispering instructions in the background! Even those instructions fell short of even basic competency. The consultants they had in mind were barely "advanced beginners" and certainly fell short of "competent" (see the Dreyfus Model)... And this was despite the supplier's sales people having talked a good talk, claiming they had the best people in the business. Suffice to say, the client went elsewhere. That was a smaller engagement... For larger engagements, I would start with a DORA 4 keys evaluation of a sample of the supplier's teams, which I'd also ask to see evidenced. Then, I'd select a random sample of those teams to mob-program with to reinforce that evidence. Only then could I endorse that supplier... So, when selecting your subcontractor/partner, just keep in mind that the firms with the best sales people with the biggest budgets to wine and dine you sometimes have the worst consultants... And sometimes the companies with the worst sales people, who sell on their people's merits and not expensive meals, have the best consultants. Navigating perceptions vs reality is the key. As they say, never judge a book by it's cover.

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The best way to minimize work is to stay on track and course correct quickly. Plus, learn why estimation techniques haven't panned out for our industry. https://lnkd.in/eXE4zx55 #SoftwareDelivery #SoftwareTeam #dotNETdeveloper #ClearMeasureWay

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Missing form labels, empty buttons, links that go nowhere... Let's stop calling this "accessibility debt." This is just incomplete development. The real issue isn't that accessible code costs more to retrofit. It's that we're calling basic HTML requirements "extra work." A button without text? That's not accessibility debt - that's unfinished code. A form input without a label? That's not technical debt - that's skipping steps. A link that doesn't go anywhere? That's not an edge case - that's broken. These things should be in your Definition of Done already. Not because of WCAG, but because they're fundamental to how HTML works. When we frame basic semantic markup as "accessibility work," we make it sound optional. It's not. It's just good development. Start there. Get the fundamentals right. The rest gets easier once your team stops thinking of working buttons and labeled forms as "nice to have." #WebDevelopment #Accessibility #TechDebt

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Hot take: Developers who marry themselves to one tech stack are limiting their own growth 🚀 After 8 years deep in .NET, I've realized something—switching languages/frameworks isn't the mountain we make it out to be. Give me 2-3 weeks, and I'm production-ready in pretty much anything. Why? Because the fundamentals don't change. Problem-solving, architecture, clean code—that's the real skill. The syntax? That's just details. Here's what bugs me though: Companies are still hiring like it's 2010. "Must have 5+ years in [insert specific framework]" Really? In the AI era where tech evolves every quarter? What if we flipped the script: - Hire for problem-solving ability, not tech stack memorization - Embrace multiple stacks for different problems (right tool for the job) - Consider part-time specialists over full-time single-stack devs - Build more resilient products with diverse tech options The math actually works out—more cost-effective, stronger products, better team flexibility. Am I crazy here, or are we overdue for a hiring philosophy upgrade? Drop your thoughts below 👇 #SoftwareDevelopment #TechCareers #DeveloperLife #CodingCommunity

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Coding agents make you faster. That part's obvious. The less obvious part is that speed without discipline just means you produce garbage quicker. I've watched teams adopt these tools and end up drowning in generated code nobody fully understood. The ones doing well aren't doing anything exotic; they review what comes out, they test it, they push back when the output is wrong. Basic stuff. Good engineering habits aren't optional just because a machine wrote the first draft. They're more important than ever.

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