The following is a user guide for me. I update it frequently and appreciate feedback. It was heavily inspired by Rands who created one of the first in 2018
About Me
My wife (Jamie) and I relocated to Nelson, BC, in 2020 after spending 15 years in downtown Toronto. We share our home with 2 dogs, Hannibal & Harper, and you can often find all of us staring at the mountains from various perches in the house. My passion is automation, reflected through constant experimentation at work and at home. When I have the time, I channel this into fabricating large metal art with dramatic fire effects, as showcased at Metaphoenix. When I am not staring into the black mirror, I am an avid paraglider progressing toward my instructor rating.
Professionally, I’m a Distinguished Engineer at TELUS, often leading our generative AI initiatives. My background is a bit unconventional—I hold a degree in Anthropology with a specialization in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. I had a particular interest in the societal impacts of emerging technologies, particularly among First Nations in Australia and Canada. This blend of technical skills and cultural insight aligns nicely with TELUS's mission to leverage technology for good.
I live by the Mantra: “Reduce Toil. Increase Happiness. Get Shit Done”
My Operating System
I Lead with Heart and Purpose. I believe every action should connect to a deeper "why." While I love systems, I know that true impact comes from blending analytical thinking with genuine care for people. Showing my humanity is a strength, not a weakness.
I Champion Belonging and Growth. I create environments where everyone can bring their best selves. Diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes, and true inclusion requires active effort. I celebrate progress and openly acknowledge we can always do better.
I Optimize for Flow and Human Impact. I love efficient systems, but I never forget that humans build and operate them. I design processes that maximize productivity while respecting human needs. Systems should serve people, not the other way around.
I Believe in the Power of Small Improvements. Small, consistent actions compound into remarkable changes. Whether fixing code or building relationships, I focus on regular incremental progress over dramatic transformations.
I Break Down Barriers. I actively remove silos, encourage cross-team collaboration, and welcome diverse ideas. I’ve learned that the best solutions often come from unexpected connections and challenging my own biases.
I Stay True to Long-Term Values. While I move quickly and embrace change, I anchor my decisions in enduring principles. I measure success not just in immediate outcomes but in sustainable impact over time.
I Choose Courage Over Comfort. I lean into difficult conversations and acknowledge uncomfortable truths. I believe in taking action, even when uncertain, because real learning often lives outside our comfort zones.
I Foster Continuous Learning. I see every challenge as an opportunity to learn. Failures are data points, not dead ends. By encouraging experimentation and open feedback loops, I enable ongoing improvement in every aspect of work.
I Practice Radical Candour. I believe in being clear, kind, and direct. When I see issues—in systems or interactions—I address them promptly and constructively. Honest, respectful feedback helps build stronger teams and better solutions.
I Build on Trust and Safety. I create environments where people feel secure to be themselves. Psychological safety is essential for innovation and problem-solving. I start with trust and work hard to maintain it.
I Am Ask Assertive, Not Tell Assertive. I respond incredibly well to “Justin, can you help with X?” and poorly to “Justin, do X.” I’m here to help, but I value respectful requests over orders.
I Struggle When Opinions Are Stated as Facts. I love clarity and reasoning. If someone presents an opinion as absolute truth, I’ll likely challenge it. I respect diverse views, but I need to understand the “why” behind them.
I Love to Start New Things. I thrive on the energy of new beginnings. Once I mentally map out how something will end, I can lose interest. Keeping me involved often means highlighting new angles or creative twists.
I Have Little Patience for Indifference. I’ll call it out if I sense a lack of care or engagement. I know I might be mistaken, so if there’s a reason behind it, please let me know. Honest dialogue helps us align.
I Am at My Worst Under Extended Stress. Prolonged stress diminishes my usual standards for people and process. If I’m aware, I’ll tell you I’m in this state and offer a guess for when I’ll return to form. If it’s constant, something deeper is wrong.
I Can Be Hyperbolic. When I’m excited, I might exaggerate. It’s not misinformation—it’s enthusiasm.
By understanding these values, ways of working, mindsets, and personal preferences, you’ll have a clearer sense of how best to engage with me. Let’s create meaningful impact together.
My Biases
- Cross-pollination > Standardization
- Excellence > Perfection
- Innovation (Chaos) > Predictability (Bureaucracy)
- Impact > Velocity
- Community > Structure
- Being Good > Looking Good
- Value Delivery > Plan Fulfillment
- Agility > Agile
- Enable > Serve
- Failure Recovery > Failure Avoidance
- Principles > Practices
- Vulnerability > Pride
- Trust > Control
My Inspirations
Charity Majors
Robin Ducot
Liz Fong-Jones
Chloe Condon
Ashley Hunsburger
Jessie Frazelle
My Emotional Intelligence
The MHS EQi2.0 assessment measures a set of emotional and social skills that influence how we
- Perceive and express ourselves
- Develop and maintain social relationships
- Cope with challenges
- Use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way
My top 3 EQi Sub-scales are
- Emotional Self Awareness (126)
- Self-Actualization (125)
- Social Responsibility (124)
My Lowest 3 EQi Sub-scales are
- Impulse Control (94)
- Assertiveness (101)
- Empathy (111)
How this can show up for me
I'm highly flexible, easily adapting my emotions, thoughts, and behaviours to changing situations. While this is a strength, I tend to rely on it too much, especially since my lower impulse control can make me hard to follow and affect those around me. I'm working on pausing to reflect on my feelings and impulses, to balance my flexibility.
My lower impulse control is connected to my self-regard. Quick reactions help me avoid uncomfortable feelings, but by understanding my emotions and why I feel them, I can improve my self-regard. It ultimately comes down to whether I feel safe or unsafe—if I can fully experience my emotions, I can accomplish anything.
You can access my most recent EQi assessments below
If you are into astrology - the internet says I am a split brain ENFP & ENTP
My Availability
I'm an Early Bird in PST I work EST hours from Nelson, BC (6am - 2pm PST). This gives me focused time for deep work and cross-timezone collaboration.
Phone Calls are for Urgency Use calls for time-sensitive or complex discussions. I'll give you my full attention.
Slack is My Primary Channel I prefer Slack for most communications. It's always on my phone and helps me manage conversations efficiently. My quiet hours are 23:00-6:00, but feel free to message anytime - I'll respond when I'm back.
My Calendar is Open You don't need to book time unless you want guaranteed availability. If my calendar looks full but you need me, let me know - I'll make time for you. Your needs are often more important than my scheduled meetings.
Email is where information goes to die. If it's important, use Slack or call. For those who want to try, my email is justin@ the domain of this website (azohra.com)
How You Can Help Me
Disagree with me. Please challenge my ideas using data, experience, or reasoning. Healthy debate sharpens our thinking and drives us toward better solutions.
Communicate. If you’re missing context—about goals, deadlines, or the bigger picture—tell me. I’ll clarify what I know or find the answers we need. It helps me help you.
Do amazing work. My expectation is excellence, but I know you can only achieve that if you have what you need. If anything stands in your way—unclear priorities, resource constraints, or competing demands—please let me know so I can help remove those obstacles.
Tell me when I screw up. When I fall short—whether it’s a missed detail, unclear guidance, or an action that feels misaligned with our values—tell me. I need your honesty to learn, correct course, and improve. I genuinely appreciate it.
My Favourite
Books
Currently Reading
- Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track is the best resource so far on what it's like to get - and perform - at the above senior engineering levels.
- EMPOWERED describes how and why empowered teams power the most innovative tech companies.
Interview preparation
- System Design Interview - An insider's guide, Second Edition is a rare resource to prepare for the systems design / architecture interview. This one is awesome.
- Cracking the Coding Interview is a classic to prepare for the data structures and algorithms interviews
- De-Coding The Technical Interview Process from Spotify software engineer Emma Bostian is a fresh take on navigating the tech the interview process, tailored for frontend engineers. She wrote the book after she found Cracking the Coding Interview to be too Java/backend-focused. The book comes with 1, 2 and 4-week learning plans as well. A great book to start with.
- Grokking Algorithms. A great intro, or refresher for all the algorithms that you'd likely need to use at a tech company.
- The Standout Developer is a complete guide for developers on job hunting, acing the interview and landing the job.
Software Development
- Clean Code A reference book of coding best practices/patterns for a healthy codebase with some case studies.
- A Philosophy of Software Design Discusses software design in a simple and approachable way, while leaving the reader novel and practical concepts to use.
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code Legacy code often has no tests. Touching it often breaks the system. This book gives practical suggestions on how to refactor.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems. The most practical book I've found so far on distributed systems.
- Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems - a good overview of SRE at Google. For those who worked at places with oncall, much of the first part of the book will likely be very familiar. Keep in mind that your mileage might vary: what works at Google scale, might not be the ideal fit for your use case.
- Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software - For experienced engineers wanting to improve architecture and devops skills on designing and operating reliable systems.
- 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers: a short and sweet book, with good inspiration from prolific software engineers
- Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries - An eye-opening view on considerations going into building a widely used public API or reusable library. While the book focuses on the .NET framework, many of the conventions apply to maintainable and reusable components, in general.
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - writing is an undervalued skill for software engineers and this book helps grow with simple and pragmatic suggestions.
- The Coding Career Handbook: guides, principles, strategies and tactics from code newbie to senior developer. I'm impressed. Lots of fresh ideas, and food for thought.
- Seeking SRE
Engineering Management
These are books that helped me level up, being a tech lead and engineering manager.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - story about a struggling company who come together under a new leader, doing small things that end up making big differences.
- Turn the Ship Around - a novel on empowerment, teamwork and breaking down the hierarchical structure. All of it taking place onboard a nuclear submarine (really!).
- The Goal - written in the '80s, yet a timeless novel on what management is about, may that be a manager of a team, an organization or an industrial plant.
- Become and Effective Software Engineering Manager -a hands-on book for people entering management, starting at a new company or looking to make more of an org-wide impact
- An Elegant Puzzle - a long overdue read for engineering leads. The most hands-on read on engineering management I've picked up.
- The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter. When joining a new company, your perception is shaped massively in your first 3 months. It takes a lot of work to change that perception later. This book is a practical guide on how to be conscious in focusing on getting up to speed, faster.
- EMPOWERED - the book describing how and why empowered teams power the most best product companies like Tesla, Netflix, or Apple.
- The Manager's Path - a concise guide for managers, from tech lead, through line managers, directors, all the way to CTO.
- The Phoenix Project - a novel inspired by the Goal, this time playing inside an enterprise in 2010.
- The Unicorn Project - a follow-up novel to the Phoenix Project, bringing more modern takes on the same problem space.
- Not everyone gets a trophy - Tips and observations on how to manage the Millenial generation better.
- Radical Candor - The definite book about giving good and candid feedback. Based on the theme of caring personally and challenging directly.
- High Output Management
Leadership & Unsorted
- Own the Room
- Never Split the Difference
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things
- First, Break All the Rules
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Bossypants
- Leaders eat Last
- Start with Why
- The Culture Code
- Date to Lead
- Team Topologies
Newsletters
Tech Leadership
- Software Lead Weekly by Oren Ellenbogen, VP of engineering at Forter. Five articles per week on technology and leadership. 23,500+ readers.
- Level Up from Pat Kua, Chief Scientist at N26. 15-20 interesting links on leadership, tech, organisations and processes.
- The Weekly Hagakure by Paulo André, previously director of engineering at Hello Fresh. A weekly newsletter with 3 article, 2 video, and 1 book recommendations for technical leaders - and the occasional longer-form thoughts.
Software Engineering
- High Growth Engineering by Stephen Whitworth, senior engineer at Monzo. One issue per week, with a deep-dive on a practice used at high-growth tech companies. Previous issues discussed static analysis, engineering proposals and scoping your work.
- The Pointer. A reading club for software developers, curated by Suraj Kapoor, fullstack engineer, product person and former VC. 10-15 links with a concise tl;dr; for each article. 7,000+ subscribers.
- Programming Digest, curated by Jakub Chodounsky, CTO at Hatch. One email per week, 5 links of programming, big data, architecture, development processes and databases. 5,500+ subscribers.
- Software Weekly. The newsletter accompanying the Software Engineering Daily podcast, curated by Abdallah Abu-Ghazaleh. A recap of top episodes for the week and another 10 interesting picks on software engineering and architecture.
- iOS Dev Weekly. A high-quality newsletter on everything iOS and Swift with lots of easily digestible content. 40,000+ readers.
Podcasts
Software Engineering
- Software Engineering Daily - longer technical interviews on technical topics.
- The Changelog - high-quality conversations with engineers, leaders, innovators in the tech world.
- The Ladybug Podcast - a fresh take on the industry with three women software engineer hosts. Shorter episodes every week or two.
- DevPath.fm - conversations with industry veterans about their software engineering careers and learnings.
- Greater Than Code - a podcast with frequent software engineering guests from underrepresented groups. Weekly episodes on the human side of tech.
Tech Leadership
- Scaling Software Teams by Woven Teams- stories on successes and failures from high-growth engineering leaders around the world.
- Level-Up Engineering by Coding Sans. Talks with successful tech leaders.
- Tech Lead Journal - discussions from software engineering leaders, with a focus on Asia and Europe.
- Decisive Moments for Engineering Leaders - a weekly, 30-minute podcast on insights to become better engineering leaders.
- HBR IdeaCast - an episode per week on a management topic featured in Harvard Business Review.
- Programming Leadership - a weekly podcast to help great coders become skilled leaders.
- The Heartbeat - a longer episode every few weeks, asking one question to a leader about their biggest leadership lesson learned.
Blogs
Often Cited Principles & Laws
Parkinson's Law
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Additionally, organizational structures tend to grow regardless of actual workload.
Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A hierarchical model of team dysfunction:
- Absence of Trust
- Fear of Conflict
- Lack of Commitment
- Avoidance of Accountability
- Inattention to Results
Team Topologies
Four fundamental team types:
- Stream-Aligned: Focused on business flow
- Complex Subsystem: Specialized component teams
- Enabling: Technical capability support
- Platform: Internal services and tools
Westrum Culture Index
A model describing three types of organizational cultures
- Pathological (power-oriented) organizations are characterized by large amounts of fear and threat. People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons, or distort it to make themselves look better.
- Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) organizations protect departments. Those in the department want to maintain their “turf,” insist on their own rules, and generally do things by the book—their book.
- Generative (performance-oriented) organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what we are supposed to do.
