Compacted Context is the personal website of Dylan Martin, where I publish essays about software engineering, career reflections, or whatever else I'm thinking about, and digests of what I'm reading (or occasionally watching).
At the turn of the 20th century, British shipyards launched something close to eighty percent of worldwide shipping tonnage.1 Yards like John Brown, Swan Hunter, and Harland & Wolff supplied much of the world’s merchant fleet. Brian Potter, Construction Physics, “How the UK Lost its Shipbuilding Industry.” Source for the UK shipbuilding figures and the Lorenz account of the industry’s…
I spent an evening going down a macro rabbit hole after reading Citrini Research’s field report on the Strait of Hormuz. One of their analysts was physically on the water near Oman, watching tankers transit through Iran’s checkpoint system, talking to fishermen and shipping captains. So sick. I texted some thoughts I’d had about it to my friend Cameron the next morning and our subsequence…
After hundreds of agent-assisted sessions, two failure modes keep showing up. They look different, feel different, and need different responses.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I make decisions; especially the hard ones, where I have a strong opinion and I’m not totally sure if it’s right. The kind where you walk into a meeting, lay out your case, and someone asks a question you hadn’t considered, and suddenly you’re on your back foot, revising your argument in real time.
This morning I woke up to a text from my dad, who was asking for my opinion on this piece from Andrew Yang. I wrote him a shorter response that contained a decent chunk of what I’m about to say, but it turns out I had a lot more to say about the topic, and when I finally got done writing it all down, I had what almost looked like a blog post. Figured I might as well flesh it out, and here we are.
A few months ago I wrote about spinning plates and racing toward bottlenecks. The gist was that LLMs had changed how I work, I was faster but learning less, and I was trying to find a balance between leverage and atrophy.
I’ve been at PostHog for about eighteen months now. Long enough to ship meaningful work, long enough to break things in production, long enough to feel the weight of both. This is my attempt to write down what that’s been like.
I redesigned this site over the weekend. If you’re reading this, you’re looking at the new version.
I was talking to my buddy Cameron about all of the custom Claude code stuff I’ve been tinkering with (I talk about this in Spinning Plates and Racing towards Bethlehem), and he asked me if he could see some of the agent stuff I’ve written. This made me realize that I’ve never actually published the dotfiles where I keep all my configurations. His question, plus recently reading Justin’s post about…
I spent a month living and working in New York recently, and I loved it — not for any one specific high, but for how much better my day-to-day life felt. The shape of my days wasn’t even that different from Seattle: I still worked, grabbed coffee, ran errands, met up with friends. It just felt easier to be out in it. More “let’s hit the town tonight” baked into a random Tuesday.