The Bad Guy

You need me this silhouette against your clean white walls, this convenient darkness where you hang your fears like coats. I am the name you whisper when your own hands tremble with want you won't confess. Point your finger. I wear the black you're too afraid…

Stop It: Notes From Nearly 20 Years of Engineering Leadership

Stop scheduling "quick syncs" at 4:45pm to see who's still at their desk. Stop measuring productivity by commits or by butts in seats. Stop calling surveillance "collaboration culture." Stop running standups where everyone recites what they already said in Slack. Stop designing process…

AI Conferences: A Costume Party for People Who Can't Spell Gradient

AI conferences seem to be nothing but costume parties where speakers dress up as data scientists but couldn't tell you what a gradient is. They'll say tensor thinking its a setting on a blender and are responding to their lunch order. The speaker lineup is people…

The Day 300 Firefighters Watched My Architecture Burn

In 2012, at EVALS, I had a major problem on day one of our launch. "The wheels are falling of the go-cart!!" We were on site at a major fire academy. 300 users on 300 iPads, recording videos, photos, and notes in real time. All of it flowing…

YAML Files Longer Than the Code They Deploy

You don't know what sudo is anymore. You're shipping production three abstraction layers deep thinking the cloud is a place. It's not a place. It's a building in Virginia that smells like burnt dust and has a bizarre buzzing noise that nobody…

AI: Now Your Systems Can Fail at Scale!!! 🎉

If your software infrastructure and architecture needs AI to "produce incredible output," you've already lost. You're clearly coping for not knowing how to build systems that are maintainable, scalable, or reliable. Therefore....... AI. CANT. FIX. YOUR. BAD. FOUNDATIONS. It will just make them fail…

From Prompt Engineer to Crayon Evangelist: A 48-Hour Journey

What if the next hype is eating crayons? LinkedIn Titles/Tags in 48 hours: 🖍️CRAYON-NATIVE ARCHITECT 🖍️CRAYON EATING EVANGELIST 🖍️STRATEGIC CRAYON CONSUMPTION ADVISOR "Most people are eating crayons wrong. Here's my 7-step framework." "Just mass-recruited 400 people who've been eating crayons since 2019.…

Super Mario Galaxy

I was extemely excited for this, because I loved the first one. This had absolutely nothing nostalgic about it and the plot was an attempted readers digest story. Watching this felt like a saturday morning cartoon that you turn off to go watch the price is right. I give it…

Meteorology Is Bullshit

Meteorology isn't astrology. Astrology is pattern-matching on vibes with zero feedback loop. Growing up, I never understood why there was a weather channel or weather section in the news. Why on earth does anyone care what the weather MIGHT be like? It either is or isn't,…