The Working Loop: Build, Observe, Adjust
A compact sample essay about shortening the distance between an engineering idea, real evidence, and the next informed decision.
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On this blog, you’ll find the musings of a lifelong programmer and engineering leader who has spent three decades building software, products, teams, and businesses.
- hack•er /ˈhækər/ noun
- A person who uses technical skill, curiosity, and ingenuity to understand, build, modify, or improve computer systems, software, or electronic devices, often through experimentation and unconventional problem-solving.
- 1996–1998Started building and experimenting on the web
- 1999–2021Bootstrapped multiple companies and completed a successful exit
- 2021–presentLeading engineering teams and building with AI
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Engineering Judgment Outlasts the Toolchain
A sample reflection on durable technical judgment, changing tools, and the questions that remain useful across generations of software.
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The Shape of a Useful Engineering Prompt
A sample field guide to giving coding agents enough context, constraints, and evidence to produce work that can be reviewed with confidence.
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Boring Systems Are Often a Competitive Advantage
A sample argument for choosing understandable infrastructure when product differentiation lives somewhere other than the plumbing.
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Debug the Agent’s Assumption, Not Only Its Output
A code-heavy sample tutorial showing how to trace an agentic coding failure back to the first unsupported assumption.
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What Changes—and What Doesn’t—Across Web Eras
A sample historical perspective on the recurring engineering lessons beneath dial-up pages, hosted platforms, cloud systems, and AI tools.
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Leadership Latency Is a Systems Problem
A sample leadership note about reducing the time teams spend waiting for decisions without confusing speed with unilateral control.
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Small Bets Produce Better Product Evidence
A sample entrepreneurship note on designing inexpensive experiments that make uncertainty smaller before commitments become difficult to reverse.
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Using AI in Code Review Without Outsourcing Judgment
A sample workflow for using automated review to widen attention while keeping engineering intent and accountability with the team.
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Give Experiments a Failure Budget
A sample management framework for deciding how much reliability, time, and user trust an experiment is allowed to risk.
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