『S1E6 - Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan on Decision Records』のカバーアート

S1E6 - Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan on Decision Records

S1E6 - Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan on Decision Records

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 Most engineering leaders think institutional knowledge loss is an inevitable cost of growth. They see departing employees take critical context with them—why certain processes exist, what problems they solve, how trade-offs were evaluated—and assume the solution involves better handoff documentation or knowledge transfer sessions. But as Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan learned through building and scaling organizations, the biggest risk isn't losing people; it's losing the reasoning behind the decisions those people made.

The difference between organizations that scale smoothly and those that constantly rehash the same choices isn't primarily about retaining talent longer. It's about capturing decision context before it walks out the door. When teams inherit processes or systems without understanding their origins, they either follow them blindly like cargo cults or abandon them entirely—often recreating the same expensive mistakes that led to those processes in the first place.

"At the moment you find yourself repeating something for the second or third time, it's time to put it in writing," Thomas explains. Decision records aren't just about documentation; they're about preserving the why behind important choices and recognizing a fundamental truth: institutional memory is strategic infrastructure, not administrative overhead.

In this episode of Velocity's Edge, Thomas, Chris, and host Nick Selby explore why decision records have become essential for scaling teams. They tackle essential questions: How do you quantify the ROI of maintaining decision records when your time is already stretched thin? Why might documenting decisions actually accelerate execution rather than create bureaucratic drag? How do decision records help both technical architecture and business operations?

The conversation reveals why the most resilient organizations aren't necessarily those with the lowest turnover—they're the ones that understand how to capture decision context so future teams can make informed choices about what to change and what to preserve.

Thomas Dullien, known as Halvar Flake, is a security and efficiency expert with deep expertise in reverse engineering, vulnerability research, and cloud economics. He founded a malware analysis company acquired by Google, where he later contributed to research on Rowhammer. He also co-founded a firm focused on system-wide performance profiling, later acquired by Elastic. His work explores the intersection of computing efficiency, economics, and sustainability.

Chris Swan is a technology leader specializing in cloud, security, and software architecture. He is an Engineer at Atsign, working on privacy-focused solutions that put users in control of their data. Previously, he held CTO and R&D leadership roles at DXC Technology, UBS, and Credit Suisse. Chris is also a Google Developer Expert in Dart and co-hosts the Tech Debt Burndown Podcast.

As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.
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