AI made coding faster, and the common advice now is to cut process everywhere so all that extra code can flow through. But some of those steps were catching risky changes before they reached users.…

What used to be the summit of software work, taste and judgment, is becoming the new baseline as AI eats the bottom tiers. A look at the inversion and the identity cost that comes with it.

American Chemical Society. “Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or incisions.” ScienceDaily, 29 September 2026.…

My Citizens! All My apologies for going dark so many months – I have been head-down constituting a brand new startup using a breakthrough AI governance architecture I crafted and you’re…

Most of the websites I showed here lately were restaurants, bars and shops. But a lot of my work is for people whose craft does not fit in a menu or a cart: a metalworks in Mijdrecht, a curtain…

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Jason Frederick continues to surf the wave of an enormously busy career that we’d normally expect from several different people. At any given moment, he might be…

custom blinkie commissions for @prophetesque and @cofyguy20 ! thank you so much :]

I’m preparing a new presentation for a delegation of European CEOs visiting Silicon Valley to explore the future of AI, business, and leadership. As part of my research, I’ve been…

I'm not fully vested in and convinced by Spec Driven Development. I've gotten over 70% of my initial "BDUF" concern and am thinking more clearly. I thought that it would be a good time for me to list…

The Cyber Veterans Alliance began with Ryan Jones’s idea for an enduring veteran-led cyber community. I subsequently helped develop that concept into a structured, independent operating model. The…

Often when working with new career practitioners on reflective practice, I get a flavour of the learner being intellectually curious, but rather than being truly reflective, they are inventorying…

Why strong careers still get Global Talent Visa rejections in 2026, and how to fix the evidence gaps assessors flag before you apply.

Startup credits last up to 12 months. After that, the usual SaaS stack costs a solo founder about 260 to 380 USD a month at list price. My startup stack needs no credits and runs for about 20 to 40…

Leveling with you.

On shared ambition, mastery, and making room for people to contribute something meaningful to the world.

Turning everyday surroundings into a scavenger hunt with Jev. Inside SpotQuest’s visual reasoning, game design, and unit economics.

We've all heard of the MVP, minimal viable product. It is the smallest amount of your offering (product, service, what-it-be) that can deliver value to your audience. Setting the bar here encourages…

When an engineer's reputation becomes tied to an architectural decision, challenging the design can threaten their standing. How teams can separate evidence from authority.

Four in ten people choose a lawyer they already know or one a friend recommends. SQE candidates should start building relationships now.

Yes, you. You right there. If you are a human being reading this and if you used to hold a title of “Software Engineer” well I’ve got some news for you. You are officially a mixture…

How I built @ilinmaksbot: project questions, an initial estimate and a brief sent to me in Telegram. A three-language portfolio and the limits of automation.

My API documentation course is free on the web, but I also sell a PDF version of it through Buy Me a Coffee. This post walks through each step of how I turn about 170 web pages into a 975-page PDF…

A profitable professional services firm can find it surprisingly difficult to finance something its leaders agree it needs. An established business has the cash but questions why it should carry the…

Leaders love doing strategy. The grand thoughts, the breakthrough ideas, the disruptive moves. Bring ‘em on! But wait. Before we get carried away with strategy, there’s something else we need…

How can your marketing make the most of your engineering deliveries? Inspired by Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy and modern changelog culture, here is how departmental coherence turns…

Why I’m making Word part of GetWill: meeting clients and fee earners in Microsoft Office, and preserving what they meant when their instructions come back.

This post follows one ticket through a German Scrum team and shows where that path breaks.

I am a good directly responsible individual in an emergency, and I do well against a reasonable deadline. That does not mean I want to live there. Manual toil is shoveling fertilizer: someone has to…

Agents sit between implementers and reviewers now, and code review has gotten lonelier because of it. Sharing agent sessions can bring the humans back.

The thing about designers is that they work as if design decides the sale. The problem is that most of them work in places it doesn’t. 75% of properly was about how much of properly an owner will pay…

A shoutout to Rino de Boer, a designer and developer from Rotterdam. For about seven years he taught Elementor and used it almost daily for client work. He made tutorials, defended it against the…

I picked up some books at the airport from Harvard Business Review's 10 must reads series. Each book in the series is a collection of 10 articles from HBR. The ones I got were: 10 Must Reads for New…

一张 GPU 跑一小时，电费大概一毛到三毛多美元，租金要两美元往上。所以算力生意的账都在合同里，价格锁多久，卡闲下来谁兜底。最后用 Abilene 把整个系列串一遍。

The office debate seems to never end, with lots of companies now demanding on-site work, both established corporations and fast-growing AI and tech startups. I see posts on social media from people…

This Is Our “17 Seconds” Newsletter #149: 17 Seconds = Useful Info Quickly. Trademark applications and registrations frequently rely on a specimen (proof of use) from your website. If you…

This acceleration makes human attention the bottleneck for agent output. Even among non-technical employees, reading all the output of their Claude agents would take half their work week. In…

Want to make better connections with people at events? Are you shy when it comes to talking to other creators, or don't know how to approach? Let me share with you what I know!

Some time back, I was fortunate enough to be promoted from engineering manager to engineering director in a large company. It was a fantastic company: great mentors, supportive structures, and…

I’ve been taking stock of the current job market by talking to former colleagues, friends, relatives, and current classmates. It is without a doubt a very frustrating and challenging job market…

Imprint’s average engineer is merging 4x more PRs than 2 years ago. Yay. Aggregated behind the average is something even more interesting: we have two teams that are merging 10x their PRs over…

Learning the VSM by Running a Restaurant The restaurant Pasta Lasta has been overbooked. The kitchen wants to know which orders take priority. The bar has its own guests to look after. Meanwhile, a…

Why "just ship faster" stops working when feedback takes months, and what engineering directors should measure instead.

After years in SRE and architecture for API Connect SaaS, I'm moving to Technical Product Manager for IBM API Connect, owning API Studio and championing stability and reliability as the foundation…

I have seen the same story play out several times: the organisation suffers a major incident or security breach, and it is decided that to prevent it happening again, all systems must check a list of…

Appraisals are daunting. Even in the most relaxed work environments, appraisals can be nerve wracking and they lay bare the power dynamic between a manager and a reportee. I’ve been thinking of ways…

An update to my post yesterday: Apparently I am the only one feeling like this. The male managers all said that they have friends that are concerned about losing their jobs to AI, but none of their…

Software engineers could learn a lot from early 2000s studio photographers.

Stakeholder influence rarely shows up as fraud. It shows up as reporting lines, performance reviews, and who gets to see the number first. If you want unbiased data, design the organization so that…

Last week there were rumors. I remember talking about it with a coworker and feeling a creeping dread in my stomach. We agreed that the best we could do was make sure our résumés were current and to…

Seven years at Senior while leading Staff-level work, a promotion promised for the following year that never came, a request to align level with scope that was called blackmail behind my back, and an…