Kelly Vaughn

First-time adult. Sr. EM @Zapier. Building on the side.

Joined Mar 2010

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This week on The Modern Leader, I'm reflecting on a management mistake I made early on, when misdiagnosing a performance problem. You'll al...

I can’t believe I’ve had 4 surgeries in 7 months. This really is a rebuilding year for me. Anyway I made it outside to the end of the drive...

You don’t realize just how much you use your core for everything until you have surgery on it and every movement hurts 🫠

New on The Modern Leader: I have to make a call before I have full conviction, which is my least favorite thing to do but exposure therapy c...

I did a big list cleanup about a month ago for The Modern Leader to remove folks not opening any emails in the past 6 or so months, and I fi...

Does anyone else reach the end of their workday and feel more tired than usual? There's a good reason: agentic development has enabled us to...

Gating your API behind a $199/mo plan and your MCP behind an Enterprise plan in 2026 is absolutely absurd.

I wrote about the Forward Deployed Engineer role and how it's becoming more popular, but it's not quite clear that companies agree on what t...

📝 The AI fluency gap between companies I was having a chat with a couple of friends about how comfortable we are sharing what we know in p...

📝 Using AI to game the on-call system I'm incident commander this week. Didn't realize until the rotation hit me (oops), so my schedule wa...

awkward time to be sending out a newsletter about your smartwatch gaslighting you, but here we are https://afterburnout.co/p/your-smartwatch...

Been a while since I wrote for After Burnout, but I'm back with a good one: https://afterburnout.co/p/breaking-out-of-the-brain-fry-spiral

Life update: Yesterday I had my third major surgery in 2026. Recovery’s going well. This third one was definitely the easiest of the 3 (as ...

modernleader.is You might be carrying an invisible gun From modernleader.is

My free 2026 Reset Challenge kicks off in just 1 week! You''ll get a short prompt each day for 3 weeks, where we identify a pattern to chang...

When's the last time you built something for fun with no expectation or plan to monetize it?