Writing

Notes on leadership, engineering, and making things.

• leadership

  9 min · July 28, 2026

  The Software You Depend On Has an Owner. Their Decision Never Shows Up on Any Spreadsheet.

  The tool you rely on can double its price one morning, close its doors, or claw a feature back. That risk isn't written on any roadmap. So who puts it on the table?

• leadership

  10 min · July 23, 2026

  Why Kings Wear Purple: The Color You Cannot Make by Saving the Day

  Tyrian purple cost more than gold because it was a system, not a recipe. Why day-saving companies drift, and how a plan turns luck into opportunity.

• leadership

  10 min · July 16, 2026

  RICE Will Not Make the Call for You. It Makes You Ask the Question You Are Avoiding.

  For most people RICE is a corporate spreadsheet. Its real job is not to calculate a score, but to sit you down in front of the questions you are afraid to answer. Why I still come back to it, on a big team and as a team of one.

• leadership

  6 min · June 11, 2026

  What Does a Founding Engineer Actually Do? The 'Founding' Is Misleading

  Founding engineer is one of the most sought-after technical roles of 2025. But most people get it wrong: they are not a founder, and the job is not mostly writing code. Backed by industry data, here is what the role really involves.

• leadership

  17 min · June 6, 2026

  Should a CTO Write Code? Stop Asking the Wrong Question

  Should a CTO write code or not? The question itself is wrong. How the role changes with the company's stage, when to touch the keyboard, and when to stay away.

• engineering

  7 min · June 5, 2026

  Is PHP Dead?

  Taking the old "Is PHP dead?" question and walking it through PHP's history and its technical turns, this piece argues that it is still a living, growing language.

• engineering

  6 min · January 11, 2026

  Data Integrity in Distributed Systems and the Debezium Call

  Trying to keep several databases consistent, I hit polling, spaghetti code, and the dual write curse. The fix was to stop asking the database 'what changed' and listen to its log instead: CDC and Debezium.

• engineering

  6 min · January 11, 2026

  Mattermost's 10,000 Message Limit and How I Moved to Matrix

  One morning Mattermost put our team's memory behind a 10,000 message wall. I weighed the options honestly, moved to the Matrix protocol, and wrote my own tool for the migration.

• leadership

  12 min · November 20, 2025

  The Prototype Illusion and the Vasa Syndrome

  Why a working prototype is not a product: the vitamin versus painkiller test, design over-engineering, and when to hold or cross the line on demands.

• engineering

  6 min · October 1, 2025

  AI Is Not a Cheat Code, It's the New Power Steering

  Every time a new tool arrived, someone called it 'not real programming'. AI is in that seat now. But the point was never the tool, it is who holds the wheel.

• maker

  6 min · September 1, 2025

  Building a Desktop App with Wails in 2025

  Notes from shipping a cross-platform desktop application with Go and web tech.