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 ...

Download this essay as PDF Software developers have a term for the practice of continuously building, testing, and shipping small changes: CI/CD. Continuous integration, continuous deployment. Yo...

Download this essay as PDF Here’s something that should be obvious but isn’t: the most powerful interface between software systems isn’t an API. It’s a conversation. I don’t mean that metaphoric...