Essays, notes, and things I'm thinking about.
2026
- DHH Goes Pencils Down A quick reaction to DHH's Rails World 2026 keynote, where he declared writing code by hand "an exceptional state" at 37signals.
- Vision Is Almost Free Why clarity may be one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost tools a leader has.
- Complexity Used to Impress Me Revisiting Werner Vogels’ re:Invent 2024 keynote on “simplexity,” and why I’m now more impressed by systems that solve hard problems without making themselves hard to understand.
- If Every Decision Needs Permission, You Have a Queue A short note on ownership, approvals, and how organizations accidentally train capable people to wait.
- The Engineer Becomes the Orchestrator As agents take on more implementation work, engineering shifts toward intent, decomposition, evaluation, architecture, and orchestration.
- Scarcity Doesn’t Disappear. It Moves. As AI makes implementation cheaper, the constraint doesn’t vanish. It moves somewhere else.
- The Best Engineers Don’t Wait for Permission A short note on agency, judgment, and what organizations accidentally teach capable people to do.
- Why I Still Build Why I still spend discretionary time building software, infrastructure, and systems even though writing code is no longer part of my day job.
- Why This, Why Now Why I’m starting to write publicly about software engineering, AI, agency, organizations, and leadership at a moment when many of the underlying assumptions are changing.