Field notes for forward‑deployed engineers.
Forward Deployed Engineers operate at the intersection of engineering, product and the customer. Translating ambiguous problems into shipped software in unfamiliar environments. This is a private community for practitioners, a place to sharpen your craft and exchange candid advice with peers who have faced similar problems in the field.
The FDE role is the highest‑leverage job in software, and the worst documented. We're fixing that.
Learning
A working library: postmortems on real deployments, prompt patterns that survived contact with customers, evals you can copy, and the boring infra glue nobody writes about.
Interviews
Hear from fellow FDEs about the challenges they face. Customer studies that deliver value and benchmarks to help you be more effective.
Advice
A private community of FDEs that share. Get answers, perspective or insights that impact your work.
My first six months as an FDE, I would have paid five figures for a Slack channel of people who'd already done it. This is that channel.
A working dossier for the job — not another newsletter you'll archive.
The Field Notebook
A growing library of deployment postmortems written by people who shipped the thing. Searchable by industry, model, and failure mode. No vendor pitches.
Weekly Teardowns
One member walks the room through a real engagement — what they scoped, what broke, what they'd undo. Recorded, transcribed, fully off the record.
Field Interviews
Recorded conversations with fellow FDEs about the engagements that shaped them — what they were brought in to solve, where reality bent the plan, and what they'd do differently. Searchable, transcribed, fully off the record.
Customer Case Studies
Anonymized walk‑throughs of real deployments — the messy customer context, the technical bet, and the outcome. Member‑contributed, peer‑reviewed, with the kind of detail vendor case studies leave out.
Office Hours
Open hours every week — drop in with a question, a customer situation or just to listen.
Member Intros
Curated 1:1 intros between members working on similar problems or in adjacent industries. Trade notes, build the network you wish you'd had earlier.
FDEs from the places doing the work, not writing about it.
Mara Okonkwo
Forward Deployed · Frontier Lab
Daniyar Ibragim
Solutions Eng · Public‑Sector AI
June Tanaka
Eng Manager · Deployments
Cosima Beltran
Founding FDE · Vertical SaaS
Photos placeholder — real members shown after invite
More than a newsletter — built for people who want to drive change.
Teardown
60 minutes. One member walks through a live deployment, anonymized. Recorded for the library.
Open Office Hours
Drop in with whatever's on your mind. Multiple FDEs on call. Bring a question or a customer challenge.
Show & Tell
Members demo something they've shipped — a prompt, a workflow, a tool. Informal, recorded, no slides required.
Field Trip
One in‑person dinner per quarter in NYC / SF / LDN. Members‑only. Chatham House rule.
The Slack
>200 vetted members, one channel per topic, a search bar that's worth more than the dues.
Member Intros
Curated 1:1 intros between members working on similar problems or in adjacent industries. Opt in, no pressure.
Bring your field notes. Get a thousand back.
We're opening with 200 founding members in July 2026. Tell us a little about your work — we read every application. If we can't take you now, you'll get the public field notes anyway.
- → Free for founding members
- → Vetted by a human before invite