Writing

Some things you want, and you can just have them. You want to read a magazine, so you go to the shop and buy one. Then you take it home...

Ford’s workers hated his assembly line1 and in their diaries expressed how unnatural it felt, and how they resented their deskilling. It took a lot of trial and error to...

When you are building software you are building a formal system, and that means at some point you need to do formal reasoning. Let’s start with the stops vs. legs...

These 3 articles from Vaughan Tan 1 about (formal) risk, uncertainty and innovation are great: How to think more clearly about risk - Vaughn Tan Innovation and not-knowing - Vaughn...

Imagine a lone botanist studying high-altitude lichens on a remote, windswept plateau in the Atacama Desert. One day, she spots something impossibly out of place: a beetle. It’s breathtaking, with...

Suppose there is a social group that likes to communicate via group chat. We’ll call its members Akira, Bilal, Chiara and Dan and refer to them as A, B, C...

Scott Werner notes in The Coming Knowledge-Work Supply-Chain Crisis that business processes for managing knowledge work ill-suited the amount of throughput it looks like we’ll get from using AI: …...

Emily Gorcenski observes about LinkedIn: I’ve been on the internet a long time. Usenet. Forums. Email lists fighting over moon landing conspiracy theories. Facebook. I had 100k+ followers and a...

There’s been some debate recently about AI art, whether it will ever count as real art or be worthy of interest. A lot of the ‘no’ side of the argument...

Being a consumer in 2024 is work. I think AI will help via reintermediation. It’s been like this for a long time - many digital businesses work by disintermediation. A...

If you watch an old movie about the stock market, you’ll see ticker tape: a thin spool of paper that is continuously printed with real-time1 information about a stock price....

The early decisions that a company makes about what it does and how it does things constrain the future actions it may take. This may fancifully be called a company’s...

Podcasts and newsletters have started doing pieces where they check the accuracy of their predictions1. This seems to be influenced by Tetlock and Gardner’s critique in Superforecasting2 that pundits don’t...

A relative told a funny story: they were working at a data science consultancy, on a customer acquisition project for a bank. One of the client’s teams were irritated by...

The chapter right after the introduction of Larson, W. (2019). An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Stripe Press1 concerns itself with sizing engineering teams. There’s a lot in this...

There are 2 failures I’ve noticed in structuring teams in ML projects. I’m construing this context quite broadly here to include engineers who build and maintain systems in which ML...

“What are your personal engineering principles?” This is one of my favourite interview questions for experienced developers or engineers. Problem-solving approach and mindset are in my view more important than...

I’ve read The Mythical Man Month and The Phoenix Project recently. They’re both excellent, and have a surprising amount in common despite the 30-odd year gap between their publication. In...

I was interested to read a post on the Squarespace engineering blog, 3 Good Types of Tech Debt, exploring the subject of tech debt. I think it’s good that the...