Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight It's well known in our industry that we should favor two-way doors, which are cheap to experiment with, over one-way doors that demand slow deliberation. While true, over time all that optionality can bite us when we try to undo several layers of two-way doors at once. Reversibility itself has a hidden cost. The best way to treat a two-way door is to reverse quickly when a choice...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I've been working with someone recently, migrating a manual, multi-step process out of Excel and into a Python workflow. It requires significant upfront work. You have to understand the task before you can automate it. But when you find the right solution, the whole thing runs without you. It's a thing of beauty. Effective automation drives the toil of a task toward zero. Wisdom...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight At PlatformCon 2026, Kelsey Hightower gave a talk titled ZTA: Zero Token Architecture (a name he admits isn't really a thing, but it sort of is now, isn't it?). The whole idea comes down to: don't outsource your ability to think, just because these tools exist. One of his examples involves working with database tables. Someone teaches an AI agent to build one, then asks it to...
2 months ago • 1 min read
This week on Book Overflow, Pramod Sadalage came on to reflect on Software Architecture: The Hard Parts. He co-wrote it, along with Building Evolutionary Architectures, the book behind Weekly Reflection #19 - Design for Evolution. In our most recent interview, he described a SQL Server database with 287,000 tables. Nobody wanted to touch it, because any change might break something no one knew was connected. Pramod treats that fear as a measurement. It marks where the coupling is hidden. So...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Years ago, I was working at a company that cut head count. My team worried about how we would keep up with the same work. Our manager stopped us and said, "No, we'll do less with less. The company made this decision, and now we will prioritize accordingly." Wisdom There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker, The Effective...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight My favorite debugging story comes from Rob Pike when he recounted a time he was pair programming with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Pike was at the keyboard. When something broke, he'd immediately dive into stack traces, print statements, and the debugger. Ken would simply stand behind him and think, ignoring the code they'd just written. Then, often before Pike had finished reading...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I love solving problems. So when someone brings me one, my first instinct is to hand over the answer. Coaching, mentoring, and being a father have taught me that instinct almost always gets in the way. What people need more than my answer is a rubber duck. In software, a rubber duck is the thing you explain your problem to, out loud, line by line. It never gives advice; it just...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight My wife just got back from a week-long surf trip on the Osa Peninsula here in Costa Rica. I noticed a difference in her right away. For months, I'd let the slow creeping monster of negativity from our industry seep into my personal life. The volatility, the hype, the insanity. I'm not proud of it. Luckily for me, one healthy conversation with the person I love and respect most in...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight A great design is easily hidden by unnecessary features. Design a working system and then: delete, delete, delete. An underrated use of LLMs: instead of cranking out 700 words of slop, ask them what to cut. Wisdom Good design is as little design as possible. Dieter Rams, Ten Principles for Good Design Reflection What feature are you defending that should be deleted? Lagniappe This...
3 months ago • 1 min read