Download this essay as PDF We spend a lot of our effort describing how something works, and much less describing what it’s supposed to do. Then we’re surprised when it doesn’t do what we wanted. ...
The legend of Paul Bunyan starts where ordinary human capability stops. He was born in Maine — some versions say it took five storks to deliver him — and together with his blue ox Babe he rearrange...
Download this essay as PDF The odd thing about Agile is that the people who wrote the Manifesto spent the next twenty years apologizing for it. Dave Thomas, one of the original signatories, gave ...
There’s a paradox in the AI energy story that almost nobody mentions. We’re told we don’t have enough electricity to train AI. We’re told we need to build a parallel grid of hyperscale data centers...
[This is a working paper.] Download this essay as PDF When Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage,” he wasn’t making a claim about theater or geography. He was doing something more intere...
Download this essay as PDF I had a pile of PDF invoices to turn into data. They came from different vendors, so the layouts didn’t match. Some had tables, some had paragraphs, some had the totals...
Download this essay as PDF For most of the history of computing, the strange thing about talking to a machine was that the machine didn’t listen. You typed. You clicked. You filled in forms. The ...
Download this essay as PDF I had an experience recently that is worth writing down, because it pointed at something larger than the project that occasioned it, and because my thinking about it ha...
Download this essay as PDF I wrote earlier this year on this topic, but improvement in emerging LLM technology is gobsmacking enough to warrant another chronicling of recent experience. The thin...
A few months ago Amazon published a case study that read (gone now from the original Amazon publishing), at first glance, like a recantation. They’d moved a service off a microservice architecture ...