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 6, 2026

An open wooden collector's case lined with green velvet, holding an abacus, a slide rule, and a vintage pocket calculator in fitted recesses, beside a smooth uncut section where a fourth instrument would go.

The Calculator Replaced the Slide Rule - Math Didn't Die

In 1972 the HP-35 made the slide rule obsolete almost overnight, but math didn't die. AI is doing the same thing to software engineering, and the fundamentals are getting more valuable, not less.