Sharing Theories with Agents
Get in sync with your agents on what you’re really building. Fabulous tool included
Systems Thinking
When individualism worked
There was a moment when individualism was compatible with human identity formation, a golden age when our lifetime and the pace of social change coincided.
Who are we Now?
This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des Cartes and Francis Bacon were the hotness. People …
Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.
When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.
Adding Correctness Conditions to Code Changes
Today I looked at the first PR on our new project repo. It added a new run script, but the README didn’t mention it. The proposed change was incomplete, because the documentation was out of sync. Did I comment on the PR? heck no. I want to fix this problem for all PRs, not just …
Speak So They Can Hear You
“My manager needs to put an ROI on everything,” an SRE leader told me at KubeCon this week. Yeah, I feel that. We know the value of SRE, smoothing all other work so that production can produce. Putting that into dollars though? It’s hard to count the cut costs of incidents that didn’t happen. Yet …
Software development is…
There is something puzzling about software development. It doesn’t work like many tasks, it doesn’t break down the same way. It feels strangely personal, like there’s a connection between the code and the coder, or else it goes brittle. Today I learned a word for this! Ursula Franklin was a physicist, among other things, and …
The world is terrible and great
Not only can things be otherwise, they already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating, connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in the making. Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, Joyful Militancy Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2025. The system is broken, it is getting worse, and …
Cascading OKRs: We can do Better
OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) are a framework for validating alignment through the organization. As a company, as a department, as a team: what are we focused on this quarter? What are we trying to make true? Alignment looks nice when the team OKRs roll up to the department OKRs, and those add up to …
Productivity v Impact
Here’s a familiar 2×2, the Important & Urgent quadrants: Very early in my career, I was taught to beware the “Not Important & Urgent” quadrant. I’m used to working in the “Important & Urgent” quadrant most of the time, getting the important stuff done just on time. This is the quadrant of productivity. A friend …