8 posts
AI & Tools
Agent workflows and tools examined through experiments, worklogs, and practical limits.
Blog
This is one body of work organized into five editorial tracks. Each track keeps a stable voice and reading rhythm, while tags connect related ideas across the whole collection.
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Editorial Tracks
Every post belongs to one track with its own subject, reading rhythm, and voice. Tags connect ideas across tracks.
15 posts
Engineering Systems
Architecture, reliability, languages, and the mechanisms behind engineering choices.
16 posts
Field Notes
Personal history, retrospectives, portfolios, and observations from work in progress.
6 posts
Leadership & Teams
Ownership, autonomy, communication, and the systems that shape how teams operate.
18 posts
Quest Engine
The connected framework, from Search, Drive, and Renew to practical applications.
2026: iPad Pro, Vision Pro, and a Device Mostly in My Drawer
Looking back at ten years with the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, why it became a single-purpose learning device, and what that suggests about the Vision Pro.
From Apple Silicon to NVIDIA AI Factories
Revisiting a 2020 Apple Silicon and AR prediction in a world where NVIDIA, AI accelerators, software ecosystems, and electricity define the next computing platform.
gen:LOCK Season 1 by Rooster Teeth
What gen:LOCK Season 1 gets right about mind uploading, mecha pilots, and the uneasy boundary between a copied consciousness and a human body.
Swift's Safety Checks: Why a Crash Can Be Safe
Swift sometimes preserves memory safety by stopping the program. Following a Character initializer into the standard library explains when to use assert, precondition, and fatalError.
The Media Consumption Arc: From Video Games to Shows to AI
Before the pandemic I avoided television shows because of their time commitment. Then watching shows with my wife helped us through isolation. Looking from college to retirement, the better question is not whether media is good or bad, but what degree of attention and responsiveness it asks from us at each season of life.
The GUI Is Becoming an Output
For thirty years we optimized software to be easy for a human hand. Agents invert that goal. The graphical interface is turning from the thing you drive into the thing you read, and the tools that survive the shift are the ones an agent can talk to.
Demystifying Spirituality
At Ranger camp we said 'be prepared: physically, mentally, and spiritually.' Physical has a home in the body. Mental has a home in the higher brain. But where does spiritual live? A secular look at how the feelings we call spiritual are the felt output of older social and emotional systems, and what the soul might be once you stop treating it as a mystery.
Director and Thinker: The Work-Mode Personalities
A long time ago a company I worked at decided that being a Relater (a Dove) was the worst personality to have. I think that judgment is wrong, and I think the whole idea of ranking personalities is wrong. Personalities are contextual: they change with the room you are in and the season of life you are in. But there is a work personality you can learn to switch into, and for engineering the Director and the Thinker are the two worth practicing.
Quest Engine: Running the Health Quest
Health is a continuous Quest Engine loop: Search for signals from the body, Drive one controlled change, and Renew from the difference between expected and actual results.
User Story Mapping for Shared Understanding
Around 2022, before AI was useful, I onboarded a whole team into a brand new area with two- and three-hour meetings every day. Documentation was thin, the knowledge lived in people's heads, and everyone was drowning. A working session built around user story mapping cut the fog: put every actor (human or system) on a visible surface, walk the flow out loud, and let the shared picture replace the marathon meetings.