My career-long struggle with picking challenge or beauty 🔗
Why I keep trading a stable career path for a detour in doing beautiful work [...]
The Thinking Builder
Posts
I'm not excited about new toys 🔗
A short rant on new model releases and why I don't follow new tool development [...]
Clocks in distributed systems 🔗
Ordering events in a system where every machine keeps its own time [...]
The AI cool off is slowly starting 🔗
Maybe it's pricing, maybe it's common sense, but the industry is course correcting on the importance of good engineering. [...]
Announcing The Thinking Builder Book 🔗
Letters on common sense in the age of thinking machines [...]
I am the bottleneck 🔗
It's hard to understand code when it's written at scale, but maybe formal verification can help with that. [...]
Finding beauty in consensus protocols 🔗
The peculiar story of the Paxos algorithm, how Leslie Lamport makes complex ideas fun, and academic papers as an interface. [...]
On AI Fatigue 🔗
I turned from a composer to a DJ and it's exhausting [...]
Learning to notice beauty 🔗
How looking closely at the world around you makes you a better builder [...]
Beauty in software is a virtue 🔗
Why I keep building UIs and why a sense of beauty is such a big competitive advantage [...]
The things I don't understand about the CAP theorem 🔗
Network partitions, disappearing documents, and the misunderstood parts of the fundamental theorem in distributed systems [...]
Confessions of a Code Monkey 🔗
Why I miss writing code by hand, and why I feel like a fast food cook once again. [...]
Jarvis, Please Build Good Software 🔗
The second-order effects of code becoming a solved problem, and why design is the next frontier in software engineering. [...]
On Reading Code 🔗
What Alan Moore can teach us about becoming better at our craft. [...]
The Long Line Behind Every Idea 🔗
Why every system, from philosophy to software, inherits its shape from what came before - existentialism, Tailwind, Gall's Law, and Canada's failed pa [...]
From Today, Programming is Dead 🔗
From Paul Valéry's twenty-year silence to painters confronting the camera to programmers facing AI - musings on the craft, commodification, and what s [...]
We Don't Live in Mathematical Time 🔗
How Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration explains why your users complain about latency [...]
Does Mastery Still Matter? 🔗
A collection of stories and memories from Jerry Seinfeld, Jiro Ono, and Krasimir Dimovski that show the importance of mastery in a post-LLM world. [...]
Yes, but does it scale? 🔗
Scale is a journey that always leads to a distributed system. But we need to evolve an architecture when pressure, not philosophy, demands it. [...]
The Quality Without a Name 🔗
How the architect Christopher Alexander inspired the software engineering field to create design patterns [...]