What Text Adventures Taught Me About Software
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
Hard-won lessons from 45+ years in the trenches.
No optimism theater What actually works
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
Remote work traded visible costs for invisible ones. Knowledge transfer, mentorship, and collaboration all suffered....
Multimodal AI sits at peak hype on Gartner's 2025 cycle. But 80% of pilots fail to scale beyond testing....
When patents matter (defensive portfolios, M&A leverage, licensing revenue) and when they're a distraction....
Serverless done right is small, stateless, and boring. The pattern that survives traffic spikes without burning your AWS bill or your team....
The graveyard is full of startups with beautiful architecture and zero traction. 70% of failed startups scaled prematurely....
Technical interviews optimize for competitive coding skills that rarely matter in actual work. What we should test instead - and how hiring could improve....
Mutation testing answers what coverage can't: do your tests actually catch bugs? Learn how to use mutation testing tools to find the gaps in your test suite....
Every abstraction layer has a cost. Benchmarks showing the real price of convenience from someone who built fast systems in the 90s and slow ones today....
LLMs confidently say strawberry has two R's because they've never seen letters—only tokens. This tokenization blindness predicts where AI will fail....
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and real-time chat for three million users a decade before the open web. The platform-as-internet pattern keeps returning....
Environmental destruction, greater fool economics, regulatory arbitrage, and ransomware's favorite payment method. The SEC was right all along....

Contrarian takes on tech, startups, and software. What vendors won't tell you. No spam.
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