Greg Buenzli
Best-selling author & engineering leader — telling true stories, on the page and in the wild.
About
Greg traded normal for a sailboat named Twig, moving his family of five — plus a dog and a cat — aboard to chase adventure on the high seas. The voyage became And Then We Hit a Rock, a best-selling humor travel memoir about everything going wonderfully wrong.
By day he leads software engineering teams. As a product and technology executive, his focus is on harnessing the collective strengths of engineers to ship innovative software — grounded in coaching, clear communication, and building environments where ideas thrive and good work feels inevitable. Whether it's a codebase or a coastline, the throughline is the same: bring good people together, and go somewhere worth going.
The Book
And Then We Hit a Rock
A family of five, a dog, a cat, and one sailboat.
After decades of dreaming and planning, the explorers finally sailed off into the sunset. They found the palm trees and coconuts they'd longed for — and glimpsed the other side of paradise: waterspouts, cargo ships, and the discovery that living the dream is rarely as tidy as the postcard.
"If everything had gone to plan, it wouldn't have been much of an adventure."
Engineering Leadership
Education — University of Colorado at Boulder
Elsewhere
Let's connect
Talk shop about engineering, swap sailing disaster stories, or just say hello.