tangentialism is David Yee!
I facilitate the life of engineering teams, most recently as VP of Engineering at the New York Times. I am also the host of Lead Dev NY, a conference that helps engineering leaders unpack a constantly-shifting industry and the tensions between organizational and human needs.
I coach engineering managers and managers-of-managers at tricky career transitions, helping them to navigate increasing ambiguity in their roles and companies.
Past roles include leading the Chorus team at Vox Media, and as the CTO and Co-founder at Editorially and 20×200. I was once known for drawing amateurish pictures really quickly and currently draw a newspaper for my kid every day.
Where To Find Me
On Mastodon, you can find me at @david@yee.camp. Bluesky, you say? That’d be @yee.camp. I was once @tangentialism on Twitter. Do I even use social media anymore? I’m trying. I live in Brooklyn and, under the right conditions, enjoy meeting for coffee.
Things I've written
- on Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management
- “What Lara does here is offer that there is nothing particularly unique to the challenge of engineering management: understanding people and how they react to the world around them.”
- Amazon‘s jobs would have been a giant nail in the coffin for the city’s underprivileged populations, already on their last legs
- “We’ve seen this before.”
- How I knew my grandmother and her food
- “She, my father, and my aunts speak in Chinese while my brother and I sit on the floor and eat all the oranges.”
- A post about creative play and, in hindsight, the ephemerality of startups
- “The craft of celebrating amateurism is one of the most fruitful community acts there is—in no small part because there are so many of us.”
- The day I left 20×200
- “The culture of startups is overflowing with mythical personae of pirates and ninjas, but I’m not a pirate—I’m an evangelist and a plumber.”
- Something I wrote about an early peer-to-peer music sharing site—still vastly better than today’s services
- “Entire catalogs of small labels and under-appreciated musicians were enshrined on Audio Galaxy, distributed to a new generation of listeners whose encyclopedic knowledge of 1960’s African Funk could challenge Fela Kuti himself.”
- Twenty internet things I like, in penitence for complaining
- “Dark days come and go, but Friday should be sacrosanct.”