Carlos Rosão

I'm an engineering leader building software and the teams that build it; after hours I make dark ambient music and read a lot of history. Writing is how I make sense of it all.

Years of leading teams left me with strong opinions about how software gets built well: small steps, fast feedback, and quality treated as the thing that makes you fast, not the thing you trade away for speed. Tales of Engineering Leadership, my Substack, is where I write those opinions down and test them against what actually happened.

Lately the building happens on metriq, an opinionated kanban board that keeps cycle-time metrics honest and treats AI agents as part of the team, and This Day in Music, which tells you what happened in music on any day of the year and gives you the playlist to go with it. Before those came other experiments, most of them about sound: onset detection in Java from my master's degree, a customizable radio for Spotify, playlists generated from the concerts happening around you, etc.

The music itself is Forsaken Art, a dark ambient project with two albums out, Fracture and Hypnagogia. I also used to host Between Birds of Prey, a weekly radio show on Warfare Radio: one theme per episode, followed through neofolk, ambient and neoclassical. The show has ended, but I keep the archives up for anyone who wants to dig in.