The CTO who still reviews code on Fridays
“Tomas Lindqvist explains why staying close to the code keeps a 300-person engineering organisation honest.”
By JOS Editorial
published September 18, 2026updated November 4, 2026
Tomas Lindqvist blocks every Friday afternoon for one thing: reading pull requests in the control-system repository.
He rarely leaves comments. The point, he says, is to know what his engineers are wrestling with before they tell him.
Batteries do not forgive
A bug in a web app costs a page reload. A bug in a 200-megawatt battery controller costs a substation.
That asymmetry shapes everything at Northwind, from release cadence to how incidents are discussed in public.
