Hard-won lessons from 45+ years in the trenches.
No optimism theater What actually works
Programming in the pre-internet era meant libraries, magazines, and BBSs. The struggle was the education - deep reading because you couldn't skim, memorization because lookup was expensive....
Technical blog posts were searchable, skimmable, and copy-pasteable. Video tutorials are none of these. The shift happened for economic reasons, not educational ones....
Debt implies payback. You won't. It compounds faster than interest. Every startup that says 'we'll clean it up after we raise' never does....
Software piracy in the 80s and 90s built the networks, protocols, and communities that became legitimate tech infrastructure. BitTorrent, streaming, cloud storage - all have roots in the scene....
Code review as practiced by most teams is a bottleneck that provides less value than we pretend. Small PRs, distributed reviewing, and time SLAs can fix it....
After 45 years in tech, I know I work faster alone. The collaboration-industrial complex says more interaction is always better. My shipped code says otherwise....
1977 was the year everything started. The Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET created personal computing. What it was like to be seven years old, wanting one desperately....
Alternative GPU clouds offer 50-80% savings over hyperscalers. The AI revolution is being democratized, but AWS would prefer you didn't know....
Standups, sprints, and story points without the underlying values. How Agile became a certification industry that produces the opposite of agility....
Stack Overflow launched in 2008. For the first thirty years of my career, 'Google the error message' wasn't an option. The debugging skills that era required are different from what developers learn t...
I've been called a 10x engineer - sometimes 20x. The variation in programmer productivity is real. But the way Silicon Valley uses the concept has damaged how organizations build teams....
Prodigy invested $1 billion building walls that collapsed when the open internet arrived. The pattern has repeated with every major walled garden since....
Contrarian takes on tech, startups, and software. What vendors won't tell you. No spam.
This site has no cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts. We don't collect, store, or sell your data. Period.
We use your browser's localStorage (never sent to any server) to remember your theme preference, scorecard answers, and which articles you've read. That's it. You can clear it anytime in your browser settings.
While you're here, some keyboard shortcuts:
Swipe left/right to navigate between articles.