Welcome to Ottoan — a digital garden on quality: principles, frameworks, and lessons from engineering and beyond.
What this is
This is not a blog. A blog is a stream of finished articles, ordered by date, that never change after publishing. A digital garden is the opposite: a network of living notes that get planted small, revised often, and linked together as the connections become clear. Some notes here are mature and battle-tested; others are barely a claim and a hunch. That’s by design — the garden is where I work out how ideas about quality, teams, and delivery actually connect to real problems at work.
How to read it
Every note carries a growth stage:
- 🌱 #seedling — a new idea, planted but unproven. Read skeptically.
- 🌿 #budding — developed thinking, tested against at least some real situations.
- 🌳 #evergreen — a stable position I’d defend, revised only as evidence demands.
Follow the links between notes rather than reading linearly — the connections are most of the point. The graph view and backlinks on each page show you the neighborhood around any idea.
A few places to start
- Build quality in — the closest thing this garden has to a root system
- Conway’s Law — why your org chart is secretly your architecture
- Theory of Constraints — why most improvement effort changes nothing
- Mechanisms, not memos — why good intentions need process design
Who’s gardening
I’m a quality engineering lead — this garden captures what I’m learning from designing QE operating models, leading testers and leads, and reading widely across engineering leadership, systems thinking, and beyond. It will grow and change shape as I do.