About
I'm Mary Gutierrez. I'm a director of engineering with over 20 years in software, and I've been building on the web since 2002.
TrekVisual is an old name with a new job. It started as the small web agency I co-ran in the early 2000s, back when shipping a site meant hand-rolled HTML and arguing with Internet Explorer. The agency wound down years ago, but I kept the domain, partly out of sentiment and partly because 24 years of history is not something you throw away. When I needed a home for this writing, it was sitting right here.
That agency was never a solo act. I co-ran it with Goran Licanin, and the good parts of TrekVisual's first life were as much his as mine.
The writing exists because of a gap I kept falling into. Like most engineering leaders right now, I was told to drive AI adoption. What I could find to read was either vendor content dressed up as advice or thought leadership from people who had clearly never had to answer for a missed sprint. Talking heads. Keyboard warriors with opinions. Nobody was writing down what actually happened on a real team: what was tried, what it cost, what the numbers said afterward, what they'd skip next time.
So that's what this site is. Every playbook is one real project from my own team, with the numbers attached and the mistakes left in. The guides are the how-to layer I wish someone had handed me. The tools are calculators that show their formulas, because I don't trust ROI math I can't argue with, and I don't expect you to either.
A few things you should know about how I write here:
- Everything is anonymized. I never name my employer, and I rewrite details that would identify a project. The lessons survive the scrubbing. The gossip doesn't.
- I lead a real team, currently around ten engineers, and the day job comes first. New pieces show up when there's something true to say, not on a content calendar.
- I'm not selling a course and I'm not building a personal brand. I'm a working manager writing for other working managers. Take what helps, skip what doesn't.
If you want to follow along, the newsletter is the way to do it. One email when a new playbook or guide goes up, nothing else.
Getting in touch
I'm happy to hear from people. If something here was useful, or wrong, or you want to compare notes on the same problem, write to me at trekvisual+site at gmail dot com. I read everything, and I answer what I can around the day job.
I'm also open to conversations about engineering leadership work. I'm not actively looking, and this isn't a pitch. But if you're working on something interesting and think I might be a fit, that's a conversation worth having.