The Why · 10 posts
Quest Engine
The model itself: Search, Drive, and Renew, the Why, the four Ws, and how they fit together.
Blog
This is one body of work organized into four 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. The tracks follow the Quest Engine's own outline: the model, the record, then Search, Drive, and Renew. Tags connect ideas across tracks.
The four Ws · 9 posts
Field Notes
Personal history, retrospectives, portfolios, and observations from work in progress.
Search: mastery · 25 posts
Software Engineering
The craft and career: languages, code, verification, agent workflows, judgment, and growth.
Drive: autonomy · 28 posts
Engineering Systems
How teams and organizations work as systems: incidents, ownership, risk, context, and the words engineers use.
Renew: purpose · 17 posts
Human Systems
The person as a system: cognitive (attention, habit, motivation, meaning), physical (the body, energy, rest), and health (sleep, stress, burnout, recovery).
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.
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.