Luke Rohde

I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up. That never really changed.

Most of my career has been in the not-for-profit sector — building software to help institutions make the world a better place, more efficiently.

I've done more or less everything along the way: network builds, database migrations, cloud migrations, CI/CD migrations, campaign software, best of breed integrations, business process reengineering, platform engineering.

I'm a generalist by nature because I love understanding how everything works and how it all fits together. I believe we make progress by combining new things in novel ways, iteratively learning, automating repetitive tasks, and killing off stuff that doesn't add value.

For a long time I thought the job was to have the best answer. I became a bottleneck and burnt out doing it. Nothing great gets built alone, and people can't be programmed like computers!

Moving into delivery changed everything. My job wasn't to have an opinion anymore. It was to get out of the way — create the conditions where a team could think clearly, disagree well, and become greater than the sum of their individual abilities. That's where my mission comes from: bring great people together to have fun and build great software.

Outside work I'm a father of two girls. We're either camping, at the beach, or I'm tinkering in my garage or on my latest software project.

This is where I write things down to figure out what I think.