Writing
Notes on software, systems, AI, and the occasional opinion that got me into trouble.
The Accidental Manager
Promote your best engineer into management with no training and you don't lose a manager when it goes wrong. You lose the team. The tax most companies pay every quarter and never see on a balance sheet.
The McDonald's Drive-Thru Cheater and the Four Types of People
A McDonald's drive-thru with an unenforced merge rule turns out to be a small daily experiment in cooperation. The four types of drivers it produces are the same four people on every engineering team.
Adequacy looks like success
Recruiters get graded on the candidates they hire. Nobody tracks the ones they reject. The system is designed to never know if it's wrong.
The Chevy bot wasn't broken
A California dealership lost its chatbot to a one-dollar Tahoe meme. The bot wasn't malfunctioning. It was misplaced. AI belongs in the layer that writes deterministic logic, not the one that executes it.
300 million devices and a 47-second problem
A story from the Samsung SmartThings scheduling system about intentional jitter, two kinds of timer events, and what a product demo reveals when the system is working exactly as designed.
AI is not your engineer, but it is the best junior you've ever had
AI won't replace your senior engineer. But if you treat it like a patient, tireless junior, you can move at a pace that used to require a team.