About
I’m Leif. I work as a Senior Engineering Manager at Ghost, where I help engineering teams learn, collaborate, and increase momentum while shipping reliable software.
From 2015 to 2024, I worked at Automattic, on WordPress.com and WooCommerce. Earlier, I was a researcher: I did my PhD in software engineering at Leibniz Universität Hannover and was a postdoc at the University of Victoria, studying how developers collaborate and learn from each other. You can find that work in my publications. I’ve worked remotely since 2014.
What I’m working on
Both at work and in my spare time, I’m curious about how LLMs are changing software development. What happens to the people who make software when AI agents write most of the code? How do we keep learning and building skill? How do we retain our understanding of the systems that we’re building?
Together with three friends, I do qualitative research into the lived experience of software engineering at LESE Lab. We study what it feels like to make software. In our current study, we interview software professionals about how they adapt to the changes that LLMs bring to their work. We are looking for people to interview — take part here.
I also work on a few side projects:
- I host a monthly get-together called Paper Jams. These are monthly one-hour video calls where I discuss an interesting research paper with like-minded people from all over the world. Lately, most of the papers have been about AI and software work. Learn more here and join — we’d love to have you!
- I run a newsletter for my hometown of Hannover, the so-called capital of mediocrity. It’s called Hey Hannover.
- I’m a part-time university student of psychology at FernUni Hagen, aiming for a Bachelor’s degree (34% done).
I care about language, writing, communication, and collaboration. I play a few instruments — guitar, drums, piano —, but I’m not particularly skilled at any one of them. I do enjoy them, though. I also like photography.
What I’m curious about
I’m fascinated by and striving to better understand The Experience of Making Software:
- What is it like as a human being to write good code or bad code, to work together with others?
- How do we and our organizations learn best? How does that change when there are no established best practices yet?
- What makes it harder to collaborate, and how can we make it easier?
- What is it like when an agent writes most of the prose and code, and what does that do to learning, skill, and trust in each other’s work?
- How do we keep an accurate mental model of a system that we’re building by steering an AI?
The writing on my site discusses research from within this sphere of interest — some my own, some by others.
Start here
- Agentic Coding Compresses Cognitive Effort — when agents do the routine programming, only the hard decisions are left.
- Just One More Prompt — on the compulsion loop of agentic coding, and why stopping and resuming are the skills to practice now.
- Working Together Through Computers: 6 Recommendations — how teams can handle the many tools they use to collaborate.
- Self-determination Theory: Understanding Human Motivation for Fun and Profit — what motivates people, and what that means when you build software.
Say hello
I’m always happy to chat. Send me an email!
Shy? Listen to an interview with me on the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast.
Or buy me a coffee here. ☕️