Software Gardener Engineering Fellow at groundcover
Code that grows. Teams that thrive.
I spend my days at groundcover, helping the engineering team keep its codebase alive and growing. I still keep a little time aside to mentor engineering leaders and to help companies hire.
What I do
Most codebases get harder to change as they grow. The metaphor of the codebase as a building gives us terms like "technical debt" and "refactoring". Both framings suggest the work is rare, costly, exceptional.
A garden is closer to the truth. Every day you weed a little, prune a little, water a little. Small ongoing care that compounds into something that grows rather than ossifies.
I've spent the last twenty years building software at startups, as a founding member of the Wix Engineering organization, later as VP of Engineering at Orbs.com, and then as an independent consultant helping teams build that practice into their own work. Recently I joined groundcover as an Engineering Fellow, and that's where most of my time goes now.
I've kept two things from the consulting years, because they're the ones I'd miss most: mentoring engineering leaders, and helping companies hire. Both fit around a full-time job. Embedding with a team for months doesn't, so I've stopped offering that.
How we can work together
I take on a handful of these alongside my work at groundcover, so sometimes there's a wait. If I can't help, I'll usually know someone who can.
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Executive Mentorship
1-on-1 with VPs of R&D and CTOs on the engineering-org questions you can't easily Google: strategy, structure, leadership, the long-run bets.
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Hiring & Interviewing
Working with management on hiring strategy and actively interviewing candidates, drawing on years of growing engineering orgs from 20 to 1,000+.
Trusted by teams at
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"Shai benchmarks candidates in a way that gives you real signal, not just gut feelings."
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"The engineering team we have today is in large part a reflection of Shai's judgment."
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"Shai's expertise, dedication, and hands-on approach have been instrumental in revolutionizing our front-end testing strategy."
Recent writing
All posts →-
Change Is Cheap. Until It Isn't.
I spent two decades advocating ATDD from the first line of code, because that was how you kept the cost of change low. AI agents changed the economics: I now start with days of violent prototyping, and only add e2e guardrails once I know what behavior is worth protecting.
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Hiring in the Age of AI Agents
A hiring process exists to approximate what it's like to work with a person. AI agents changed how candidates write code, so I now let them use agents in pair-programming interviews; the signals I read stayed almost the same, and the project and system design questions survived untouched.
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The Era Of Bespoke Software?
LLMs collapse the cost of writing single-use software, making bespoke viable where reuse used to win by default. Here's the framework for when bespoke beats reuse, when reuse still wins, and the real question underneath both.
Hiring, or looking for a sounding board?
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