Years ago I worked on a software project for specialist users. They hated it. Absolutely despised this application. When I finally got the chance to visit the dev team in Long Beach, what I discovered what that almost none of them had ever actually used the software they were building. Some had never even seen […]
We’ve all been in this meeting. Someone presents an idea. It’s not perfect, but it’s solid and it could work. And then that guy raises his hand. “Well, have you considered…” What follows is fifteen minutes of edge cases, hypotheticals, and thinly veiled condescension. The idea gets picked apart. The presenter gets demoralized. The meeting […]
Once upon a time, there was a small business owner who hired workers and crafters to do carpentry work: framing houses, roofing, all kinds of construction. These workers spent their days swinging hammers and driving in nails to get the job done. Then one day, the business owner discovered a new tool: the nail gun. […]
It seems like we’ve been seeing a lot of layoffs in the tech sector lately. More than usual. I’ve been thinking about this lately because I saw an analogy online that stuck with me. Someone said something like, “I’m a PhD and one of the world’s best electric vehicle scientists! Why would they lay me […]
I’ve been noticing a pattern at work lately: people getting frustrated with their teammates because “It’s easy, why are we having challenges?” After this happened more than once while discussing a project that was facing implementation challenges, I started thinking about it. Was it easy, what the team was struggling with? If it truly was […]
After extensive soul-searching and several conversations with Claude, I’ve identified my New Year’s resolutions for 2026. I know what you’re thinking—these sound like terrible resolutions. But hear me out. 1. I Resolve to Be Lazier Specifically, I resolve to use more AI, more automation, and more tools. And to stop doing things that don’t have […]
Do you ever hear the saying “the days are long but the years are short”? I think that might be 2025 for me in a nutshell. There are multiple strategic efforts and issues I’ve been working on all year. It feels like they’re just dragging along and taking forever, and I look around and wonder […]
Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of employees in an organization do 50% of the work. In tech, especially software development, its even more extreme—the top 10-30% of your team might be doing 10x the output of everyone else. But whether you’re painting houses, writing code, or manufacturing cars, this pattern […]
I wanted to follow up on my last blog post. Now I am aware that someone can read that post and just tear it to shreds. The assumption is that the electrician is working towards an experience-based and intuition-driven understanding of the outcome. But technology marches forward, and we have to question whether the electrician […]
I love analogies. Here’s another one! Let’s say you have a house, an older house: 30, 40, maybe even 50 years old. And it’s having electrical problems; lights flicker, outlets don’t all seem grounded, switches don’t all work. If you brought in a highly experienced and skilled electrician, that person could probably, within about 45 […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 