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.
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.
Proof-Carrying Work: Demonstrating Human Mastery in an AI-Assisted World
A proposal for making human and AI contributions visible through provenance, reproducible work, and demonstrated understanding.
One Core, Many Languages: Three Ways to Share Code on the Same Machine
An exploration of same-node code sharing across languages through three boundaries (in-process gRPC over protobuf, WebAssembly modules, and FFI), why WebAssembly is the most versatile, and how platform and performance decide which one you use.
Swift's Actor Model vs Rust's Ownership: Why Rust Doesn't Need Actors
A Swift admirer's deep dive into why the actor model feels like it stops short of full isolation, why Rust reaches data-race freedom without any actors at all, and why adding strict, safe concurrency to a mature language is a monumental engineering pursuit worth praising.
Burnout Is a Control Problem, Not an Hours Problem
More than a decade ago I burned out badly, and the obvious story (too many hours) turned out to be wrong. Burnout wasn't the work I did; it was the control I lost over where my time went, and everything the work made impossible outside of it.
The Background Brain: Why Boredom Makes Ideas
Some of my best ideas came from stopping work, not doing more of it. Learning How to Learn's diffuse mode, Kahneman's System 1, and Cal Newport's Slow Productivity all describe the same mechanism: the mind does its best creative work in the background, so past a point more hours make creative output worse, not better.
Shift Left Until the PR Is Just a Confirmation
Agentic tooling made pull requests cheap and plentiful, so the bottleneck moved from writing code to trusting it. The answer is not another review loop but front-loaded rigor: invest the engineering effort ahead of time to build a full, production-shaped synthetic environment you run locally, so that validation itself becomes cheap and the PR turns into a context-sharing mechanism instead of an approval gate. Tools like .NET Aspire and Dapr show what that inner loop can look like, and the same principles carry over to homegrown systems.
Independent Fire
A George Washington film handed me a phrase that stuck: 'independent fire.' I cannot vouch that Washington ever said it, but the tactic it points at is real history. The colonists could not win by copying British linear volleys on open fields; they had to use cover and let soldiers pick their own targets. Independent fire is the perfect model for how high-agency engineering teams should be allowed to operate.
World Cup 2026: Star Players, Team Strategy, and the Single Point of Failure
Watching World Cup 2026, some squads talk like a single organism and others like strangers in matching shirts. Soccer is a one-dimensional model of a team (one field, one ball, one clock); engineering is played across many planes at once and across time. The lesson: stardom is local, the most valuable star is the versatile generalist who moves between planes and passes the ball six months into the future, and resilient teams rotate that capability instead of betting on one hero.
Resourcefulness Is Its Own Quest Engine
Acquiring your own resources is one move in the Quest Engine, but zoom into that single move and it turns out to be a whole engine of its own. Being resourceful means running the full loop on the problem of getting what you need: you search for the resource, you act to acquire it, and then you improve the system that acquires. Resourcefulness is not a trait you either have or lack. It is a cycle you can run on purpose.