I’m Panji Gautama. I write about engineering leadership, product, and how I work.
Thoughts on Developer Productivity
Pressure to do more with less has made engineering productivity harder to ignore and easy to oversimplify. I share the delivery proxy metrics we developed at TipTip, drawing on DORA, SPACE, and related approaches. These measures support conversations about team effectiveness and contribution; interpreting individual performance still needs manager judgment, calibration, and feedback from other people.
Convergence as Tech Debt Safeguard
Technical debt competes with product work for the same engineering time. I describe an approach that separates shaping from building, then brings the team together for a convergence sprint to address bugs and critical debt. It gives feature development some protection from interruptions while making room to deal with the operational problems that would otherwise keep accumulating.
On maintaining a reading pace
I noticed my reading pace and concentration slipping and started trying small changes to how I read. These personal notes cover using a pencil as a pacer, working on peripheral vision, and switching between fiction and nonfiction. They record experiments and impressions rather than measured results, with an invitation to share other ways of making reading feel easier.
Talking about Runbook
An alert tells us something needs attention; a runbook helps someone act on it. I describe how detailed instructions support incident response and recurring engineering operations at TipTip, especially when the responder is new to a service. Capturing the investigation steps and specialist knowledge can make triage more consistent and reduce the need to escalate every issue.
Turning Elephant into Colony of Ants - XYZ
Using a fictional product informed by experience, I outline an incremental move away from a monolith through a strangler facade. The proposal separates the responsibilities of the API gateway and facade, considers domain boundaries and data access, and weighs migration risks. The goal is scalable, independently maintainable services without assuming that every extracted component must become a tiny microservice.
Video & Audio Codec Primer
These notes bring together the video and audio concepts relevant to TipTip's streaming needs: compression, bitrates, codecs, transcoding, containers, and adaptive streaming. I connect those terms to device compatibility and delivery choices, including HLS and DASH. The post preserves the technical context of the 2022 decisions and the tradeoffs we were considering for a streaming platform.
Engineering Metrics
There are plenty of engineering metrics available, but deciding which ones matter is the harder question. This short post points to my presentation, Metrics That Matters in Software Engineering. The slides are the main resource here; the post introduces the question of whether the numbers we track provide useful insight into the work of an engineering team.
How to work with Panji
Writing down how I work helps me examine the manager I want to be and make my expectations clearer to others. This is my working manual: communication, one-to-ones, learning, career conversations, ownership, and work-life harmony. It also sets out the values I try to follow, including transparency, trust, and being open to feedback when I get things wrong.
CTO CheckList
Technology management reaches beyond writing code and building services, and a checklist has helped me keep that broader responsibility in view. This short post links to my expanded version of a checklist originally found through Rutul Davé. The checklist lives in the linked document; the post explains where it came from and why I kept developing it.
Tech Debt Management
This is a resource post linking to a video and my Taming Technical Debt presentation on SlideShare. The material is shared through those links rather than a written article on this page. Use it as a starting point for finding the talk and slides when you want to explore the topic of technical debt management.