Tech has no shortage of meetings, but the 1:1 might be the last one where the truth still shows up. This piece is about protecting that space from sliding into performance theatre, noticing the subtle signs when trust is eroding, and creating enough room for the real stuff: fatigue, pride, hard conversations, and the context that makes great work possible. The 1:1 is the smallest unit of culture you still control. Treat it carefully, protect it, and it will quietly pay back in trust, and the kind of momentum you can’t roadmap.

Your AI is only as good as the ticket you hand it. We dig into how vague requirements sabotage both humans and machines, why Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria act as a clarity multiplier, and how the simple Given-When-Then structure turns fuzzy intent into something AI can reliably execute. If you're leading teams, working with AI agents, or just tired of reviewing PRs that “technically work” but miss the point, this is your guide to writing tickets that actually get the right thing built.

Tilt (formerly Empower Finance) developed a context-aware review bot using Augment Code's context engine to transform code quality and velocity on its fintech platform. By leveraging Augment's deep codebase understanding of architectural patterns and team conventions, which distinguishes it from generic AI tools, the bot provides more consistent feedback and achieves faster review cycles, reducing cycle time by up to 40%. This solution allows engineers to focus on architectural decisions and complex logic, serving as an augmentation, not replacement, for human reviewers.

Most companies think buying an AI tool is the hard part, but the real challenge is building the scaffolding that makes it useful. At Tilt, adoption only worked once engineers invested in documentation, rules, and workflows that embedded AI into daily practice. This post explores how that infrastructure was built, why it matters, and what other teams can learn from it.

In the era of blazing fast compute and memory it’s easy for the performance characteristics of System objects to feel like a thing of the past. However scale in the end, can defeat all our expectations. With Strings we need to be considerate because they are immutable! This means operations like ToUpper() create a new string in memory. With large datasets this can lead performance issues.

At Empower(Tilt), a data-driven fintech startup, our lifeblood is understanding our users and how they interact with our products. To do that effectively, we need to get new features and product updates into their hands fast. If you've ever worked in a startup, you know the pace is exhilarating, and the need for speed is paramount. For our iOS team, that meant taking a hard look at our release process. We went from a painstaking weekly manual ordeal to a highly automated, almost "set it and forget it" system that allows us to iterate at lightning speed.

A seemingly simple FK constraint drop turned into a high-stakes locking issue that threatened database stability. This post dives into the surprising chain reaction between two related tables and reveals a clever zero-downtime workaround using sp_rename. Perfect for engineers who love creative solutions to tricky schema changes—plus some spicy alternatives if you're feeling bold.

Empower's engineering team is redefining what it means to use "the best tools" in a world where AI isn’t just a novelty, but a game changer. In his latest post, James Garrett shows how innovative AI tools are transforming on-call support, QA, and code reviews—taking the timeless principles of the Joel Test into the future. Dive in to see how early adoption is turning everyday challenges into competitive advantages.