Hard-won lessons from 45+ years in the trenches.
No optimism theater What actually works
MVP was meant to be a discipline for validated learning, not permission to ship half-finished software. The corruption of the concept has given founders an excuse to skip the hard work of building som...
Kubernetes Ingress NGINX will receive no security patches after March 2026 due to maintainer burnout. 60% of open source maintainers work unpaid. Critical infrastructure is dying from neglect....
The senior engineering interview process tests preparation, not ability. 63% of seniors get downleveled. Here's what actually predicts success and how to hire differently....
Most rewrites fail, but some succeed. The patterns that separate the 10% from the 90%: scope discipline, team continuity, good-enough architecture, and political protection....
Speech-to-speech AI has crossed the 300ms latency threshold where interactions feel like genuine conversation. What this means for voice interfaces and where it still fails....
LLMs are amoral pattern engines that will confidently lie because confident lies were in the training data. Understanding this predicts where they'll fail—and why you can't trust their self-reports....
CompuServe had first-mover advantage, loyal users, and great technology. They still lost to AOL. The lessons about platform economics, business model evolution, and corporate ownership remain relevant...
DeFi advocates claim they're building the future of finance while removing everything that makes finance work: recourse, recovery, accountability, and insurance. Billions lost to hacks prove the point...
Per-seat pricing is a legacy model from when humans were the unit of work. AI is exposing the lie: vendors want seats, not efficiency. Here's what's replacing it....
AI agents have real limits. They won't replace judgment, empathy, expertise, or physical labor. Understanding these boundaries is essential for successful deployment....
Only 23% of offshore partnerships succeed. Hidden costs in rework, management overhead, and quality remediation often exceed what internal development would have cost. Here's why the boomerang always ...
Knowing when to shut down is harder than knowing when to start. The sunk cost fallacy kills more founders than failure....
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