Recent writing
New ideas, field notes, and useful tools
- A skill for single-player agentic knowledge managementai
A CLI and a set of Claude hooks that let agents file small facts mid-session, queue them for my review, and read them back when the next session starts.
- Concept to Cash: Initiative retrospectives and visualizationplatform-engineering
Modeling an initiative as a distributed trace — epics, stories and pull requests as nested spans — to see where the calendar time actually went, plus a ridgeline plot for tracking WIP.
- A framework for cataloguing technical debtleadership
A simple framework for scoring technical debt so you know what to do now versus later
- Scaling at the mediumest company: half-measures save the daysearch
At medium-sized companies, the low-hanging fruit is just sitting there. How basic profiling and boring fixes got an ecommerce search service to 3x peak traffic before Black Friday.
- On MCPs vs CLIsai
MCPs are useful, but often overused in my opinion. This is how I think of each one.
- CI Theater: we deleted our flaky tests and nothing brokeci-cd
One in four deploys failed — not because the code was wrong, but because the pipeline couldn't be trusted. Here's how we fixed it.
- Claws Don't Need to Be Complicated: A Personal AI Agent in Goai
How I built a persistent personal AI agent in 2000 lines of Go that uses my Claude subscription instead of API keys, runs sandboxed via nono and talks to me on Telegram; Learnings about what seems to matter.
- How to diff a book against your mindai
Using a personal knowledge base, we can use embeddings to diff a book against your current knowledge to find novelty.
Selected writing
Useful places to begin
A few older pieces that have held up.
- Software deliveryAn attempt at defining an ideal pipeline
What it takes to move a well-tested change from pull request to production without unnecessary human gates.
- ReliabilityLearning from Production Incidents
Incidents are a source of operational knowledge—if teams make room to learn from them.
- Platform engineeringFeature Flags, Dynamic Config and Experimentation
A practical distinction between the tools teams use to safely change behavior in production.
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The archive
Writing from earlier chapters
More than 80 posts on software, teams, tools, and the occasional detour. Kept public for posterity.
Browse the archive