Stop Celebrating Burnout

My first startup, EVALS, took everything from me. I spent all waking hours working. I spent my 10-year wedding anniversary in a hotel room working. I missed milestones with my kids because I was working. I missed time with my mom before she died from cancer because I was working.…

Do Everything and Nothing Well

Your SAAS has a pocket knife problem. The Swiss Army knife works because it does a few things incredibly well. The blade cuts. The screwdriver turns. 🤯 For some reason, though, some of y'all looked at this and said "what if we added 32 toothpicks, a magnifying glass,…

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…

I've been in AI since 1998

I've been in AI since 1998. Back then, we called it T9 predictive text. I learned which numbers produced which letters. I got fast at it. Really fast. Oh, and learning what number combination from pagers meant: "143", "411", and "07734". Beep…

AI Thought Leader Starter Pack

I knew this existed!!!!!!!!!!! Wonder if they sell these at the AI Conferences? AI Conferences: A Costume Party for People Who Can’t Spell GradientAI 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’…

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…