About

The first pancake is the one you throw away. Every cook knows this. The pan isn't hot enough, the batter hasn't settled, you haven't found the right timing yet. It comes out wrong. You don't serve it. You make it anyway. You have to. That's how you learn the pan.

A lot of what organizations build gets built on top of that first pancake. The experiments that didn't quite work. The hires that revealed what you actually needed. The frameworks that held until they didn't. I've been that pancake more than once, and I've watched others be it too. The learning doesn't stop, especially now, when the technology is moving fast enough that nearly everything is an experiment again, no matter how long you've been doing this.

I'm Giovanni, a solutions engineering leader. You can find me on LinkedIn.

I write here because I think I have good ideas worth sharing. Writing is the thing that forces them into a shape other people can actually use. I've started a project like this and let it drop more than once. What surprises me every time I come back to it is how much I learn from the conversations it starts. The point is to keep learning, and that goes faster with other people in the room.