The archive

Every essay, in one place. Browse by tag or year, or search the full text - the URL holds your selection, so any view is shareable.

7 total essays 8 tags since 2026

3 essays match

Sep 3, 2026

A four-story brick apartment building with every window lit and plants in the window boxes, beside an empty dirt lot where a yellow crawler crane holds its wrecking ball drawn back, an instant before swinging into the building. A single brick and a rolled-up drawing lie in the dirt.

Things You Should Never Do, Revisited

Joel Spolsky told a generation of engineers to never rewrite from scratch. Twenty-six years later, with agents that can read and rewrite a codebase in days, does the advice still hold?

Aug 26, 2026

Six different pairs of shoes lined up under a wooden locker-room bench, all pointing the same way: scuffed high-tops, new white sneakers with the tag still on, work boots, small green-strap kids' trainers, polished black dress shoes, and worn cream running shoes.

Meet Them Where They Are

A senior engineer from my team who went on to business school came back years later to interview me about leadership. What a team of ten or more teaches you about meeting people where they actually are.

Jul 13, 2026

Socrates in an olive robe leans forward mid-argument, one finger raised, while a small deadpan gray robot seated on a marble plinth holds out a finished scroll; three scrolls lie on the marble floor between them, beneath a terracotta fresco in a columned hall.

How I Work With Agents

A mandatory workshop in February put me back into hands-on engineering and changed how I work. These are the practices I've learned from countless hours with agents since - most of them useful well beyond coding.