About The Long Commit
The Long Commit is a weekly newsletter for senior+ engineers and engineering leaders building better judgment, stronger teams, and durable careers.
I write about the work under the headline: what AI changes in real teams, what it leaves untouched, and what senior engineers need to get better at when the easy story is “everyone will move faster.” I am interested in the gap between productivity claims and the slower questions: who reviews the work, who owns it in production, how engineers keep growing, and what leaders normalize when they reward speed without understanding the cost.
What I Write About
🤖 AI and engineering judgment. Most AI commentary stops at whether the tool is impressive. I care more about what changes after the demo: review habits, ownership, incident response, hiring signals, and the parts of engineering judgment that become easier to skip when the output looks confident.
🧭 The senior developer path. Senior is not the finish line. It is where the work becomes less about proving you can code and more about deciding what deserves your attention, how to create leverage without losing judgment, and how to keep growing when the obvious ladder gets vague.
👥 Leading through change. You do not need a manager title to shape a team’s response to AI, process churn, or career uncertainty. I write about the conversations senior people are already having: what to adopt, what to resist, what to measure, and what to refuse to make normal.
👋 Who This Is For
🧑💻 Mid-to-senior engineers deciding how to grow as tools and expectations change.
🧭 Staff engineers and tech leads responsible for technical judgment, review, and ownership.
🚀 Engineering managers leading adoption and process change without losing the learning loop.
📈 Founders who want to build high-performing engineering teams.
If you want certainty, I will probably annoy you. If you want useful questions, careful bets, and practical language for your own team, you are in the right place.
Who I Am
I am Juan Cruz Martinez. I have been working in software for more than 20 years, as consultant, engineer, tech lead, and currently run the developer content team at Auth0/Okta.
I have built things that worked, things that failed quietly, and a developer blog that reached 100,000 monthly readers before I shut it down. That background does not give me clean answers about what comes next. It does give me a useful allergy to them.
🙌 For free subscribers
One issue every Tuesday. These are full, or half, deeply researched articles, analyses or essays exclusive to The Long Commit.
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This newsletter is funded by paid subscriptions from readers like you. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive the full experience!
🔒 Become a Paid Subscriber
Paid subscribers receive:
One issue every Tuesday. These are full, deeply researched articles, analyses or essays exclusive to The Long Commit.
Twice a month, on Thursdays: long-form articles on engineering practice. These pieces go deep on career growth and engineering leadership, with practical ideas readers can apply to their own work and teams.
Resources and templates for engineering leaders and engineers.
Paid subscriptions support the time I spend researching, writing, editing, and building this publication. I also want the paid tier to feel useful in its own right.
30-day refund. If your first paid subscription was purchased on the web and does not feel useful, reply within 30 days of the initial charge. I will cancel it and refund that charge in full. App Store purchases follow Apple’s refund process.
What You Can Expect
I will not fill your inbox with generic AI news, tool roundups, or career advice detached from real engineering work.
Every issue should earn its place by giving you a sharper question, a more useful decision frame, or language you can take back to your work and team. I will tell you what I think, show you what supports it, and be honest when the answer is still unsettled.
Get in touch
Once you subscribe, reply to any issue. I read every reply.
Tell me where you are in your career, what problem you are working through, or what you think I have missed.
