About The Long Commit
The Long Commit, written by Juan Cruz Martinez, is for software engineers who’ve been around long enough to be suspicious of clean answers. The ones who’ve watched companies chase AI productivity gains and wonder what that actually means for their teams, their craft, and their careers. The ones who are senior enough to have opinions, but honest enough to admit those opinions keep getting revised.
I try to write the way I think through problems: slowly, with some wrong turns, and without pretending I've figured it out by the end. If you want the polished take, there are better newsletters. If you want the honest one, you're in the right place.
What I write about
There are three things I keep coming back to, issue after issue:
AI and what it actually means for your career. Not the hype version, not the doomer version. The one where you’re a working engineer trying to figure out whether to feel threatened, excited, or just confused. I’m interested in the gap between what’s being promised and what’s changing on the ground.
The senior developer path. What it takes to get there, what nobody tells you when you do, and what happens when you realize “senior” was supposed to be the destination but it turns out it’s just the beginning of harder decisions. A lot of this comes from watching engineers plateau not because they stopped growing, but because they were growing in the wrong direction.
Leading through change. Whether you manage a team or just influence one, working in tech right now means constant context-switching between what you know and what you’re supposed to know next. I write about that tension honestly, including the parts where I don’t have a good answer yet.
Who this is for
Mid-to-senior engineers and engineering leaders who want to think harder about their careers, not just optimize them. One issue per week, on Tuesdays.
About me
I’m Juan Cruz Martinez. I’ve been writing software for over 20 years and currently run the developer content team at Auth0/Okta. I’ve built things that worked, things that didn’t, and a blog that hit 100k monthly readers before I shut it down. I’m not an expert on what comes next. I’m just paying close attention.
