2026: iPad Pro, Vision Pro, and a Device Mostly in My Drawer
Looking back at ten years with the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, why it became a single-purpose learning device, and what that suggests about the Vision Pro.
Masters3d - Blog
Technical. Creative. Tactical. Director.
Latest posts
From Apple Silicon to NVIDIA AI Factories
Revisiting a 2020 Apple Silicon and AR prediction in a world where NVIDIA, AI accelerators, software ecosystems, and electricity define the next computing platform.
gen:LOCK Season 1 by Rooster Teeth
What gen:LOCK Season 1 gets right about mind uploading, mecha pilots, and the uneasy boundary between a copied consciousness and a human body.
Swift's Safety Checks: Why a Crash Can Be Safe
Swift sometimes preserves memory safety by stopping the program. Following a Character initializer into the standard library explains when to use assert, precondition, and fatalError.
The Media Consumption Arc: From Video Games to Shows to AI
Before the pandemic I avoided television shows because of their time commitment. Then watching shows with my wife helped us through isolation. Looking from college to retirement, the better question is not whether media is good or bad, but what degree of attention and responsiveness it asks from us at each season of life.
The GUI Is Becoming an Output
For thirty years we optimized software to be easy for a human hand. Agents invert that goal. The graphical interface is turning from the thing you drive into the thing you read, and the tools that survive the shift are the ones an agent can talk to.
Demystifying Spirituality
At Ranger camp we said 'be prepared: physically, mentally, and spiritually.' Physical has a home in the body. Mental has a home in the higher brain. But where does spiritual live? A secular look at how the feelings we call spiritual are the felt output of older social and emotional systems, and what the soul might be once you stop treating it as a mystery.
Director and Thinker: The Work-Mode Personalities
A long time ago a company I worked at decided that being a Relater (a Dove) was the worst personality to have. I think that judgment is wrong, and I think the whole idea of ranking personalities is wrong. Personalities are contextual: they change with the room you are in and the season of life you are in. But there is a work personality you can learn to switch into, and for engineering the…
Quest Engine: Running the Health Quest
Health is a continuous Quest Engine loop: Search for signals from the body, Drive one controlled change, and Renew from the difference between expected and actual results.
User Story Mapping for Shared Understanding
Around 2022, before AI was useful, I onboarded a whole team into a brand new area with two- and three-hour meetings every day. Documentation was thin, the knowledge lived in people's heads, and everyone was drowning. A working session built around user story mapping cut the fog: put every actor (human or system) on a visible surface, walk the flow out loud, and let the shared picture replace…
User Story Mapping for Shared Understanding
Around 2022, before AI was useful, I onboarded a whole team into a brand new area with two- and three-hour meetings every day. Documentation was thin, the knowledge lived in people's heads, and everyone was drowning. A working session built around user story mapping cut the fog: put every actor (human or system) on a visible surface, walk the flow out loud, and let the shared picture replace…
Proof-Carrying Work: Demonstrating Human Mastery in an AI-Assisted World
A proposal for making human and AI contributions visible through provenance, reproducible work, and demonstrated understanding.
One Core, Many Languages: Three Ways to Share Code on the Same Machine
An exploration of same-node code sharing across languages through three boundaries (in-process gRPC over protobuf, WebAssembly modules, and FFI), why WebAssembly is the most versatile, and how platform and performance decide which one you use.
Swift's Actor Model vs Rust's Ownership: Why Rust Doesn't Need Actors
A Swift admirer's deep dive into why the actor model feels like it stops short of full isolation, why Rust reaches data-race freedom without any actors at all, and why adding strict, safe concurrency to a mature language is a monumental engineering pursuit worth praising.
Burnout Is a Control Problem, Not an Hours Problem
More than a decade ago I burned out badly, and the obvious story (too many hours) turned out to be wrong. Burnout wasn't the work I did; it was the control I lost over where my time went, and everything the work made impossible outside of it.
The Background Brain: Why Boredom Makes Ideas
Some of my best ideas came from stopping work, not doing more of it. Learning How to Learn's diffuse mode, Kahneman's System 1, and Cal Newport's Slow Productivity all describe the same mechanism: the mind does its best creative work in the background, so past a point more hours make creative output worse, not better.
Shift Left Until the PR Is Just a Confirmation
Agentic tooling made pull requests cheap and plentiful, so the bottleneck moved from writing code to trusting it. The answer is not another review loop but front-loaded rigor: invest the engineering effort ahead of time to build a full, production-shaped synthetic environment you run locally, so that validation itself becomes cheap and the PR turns into a context-sharing mechanism instead of an…
Independent Fire
A George Washington film handed me a phrase that stuck: 'independent fire.' I cannot vouch that Washington ever said it, but the tactic it points at is real history. The colonists could not win by copying British linear volleys on open fields; they had to use cover and let soldiers pick their own targets. Independent fire is the perfect model for how high-agency engineering teams should…
World Cup 2026: Star Players, Team Strategy, and the Single Point of Failure
Watching World Cup 2026, some squads talk like a single organism and others like strangers in matching shirts. Soccer is a one-dimensional model of a team (one field, one ball, one clock); engineering is played across many planes at once and across time. The lesson: stardom is local, the most valuable star is the versatile generalist who moves between planes and passes the ball six months into the…
Resourcefulness Is Its Own Quest Engine
Acquiring your own resources is one move in the Quest Engine, but zoom into that single move and it turns out to be a whole engine of its own. Being resourceful means running the full loop on the problem of getting what you need: you search for the resource, you act to acquire it, and then you improve the system that acquires. Resourcefulness is not a trait you either have or lack. It is a cycle…
My Swift Journey: Why I Love It but Can't Use It at Work
Swift might be my favorite language, striking a rare balance between low-level and high-level features, yet I've never been able to use it professionally. This is why, and what it takes for a language to break out of its home ecosystem.
The Four Capabilities and the Human Singularity of the Quest Engine
Mustafa Suleyman named four capabilities that would make him shut an AI down. They map exactly onto the Quest Engine: one of them (setting its own goals) is the Objective Function, and the other three are Search, Drive, and Renew. The full mapping exposes the one layer the framework leaves to you: staying conscious of your own why while the loop closes on itself.
25 Years of Operating Systems: Windows, macOS, and Back Again
A personal retrospective spanning 25 years of operating systems, from Windows 98, 2000, and XP through a decade of macOS to a return to Windows 10 and 11, and a look at where a fully Linux development environment might fit next.
The Bicycle of the Mind: Fast, Slow, and Automatic Thinking About Agents
Kahneman's two modes of thinking (fast System 1 and slow System 2) map onto learning to ride a bicycle. Attention gives way to automaticity, and that same arc is a methodology for thinking about agents, leverage, and engineering systems.
Blameless Engineering: No Heroes, Just Systems
Blameless engineering, borrowed from Google's SRE culture, is usually filed under postmortems. But the postmortem is only the last place the culture shows up. Blamelessness shifts all the way left into how you design systems, and it lands on one uncomfortable rule: the team is the unit of work, and heroes are a symptom of a system that is not yet well crafted. In the age of agents, where…
A Case Against Using the Word 'Bad' in Engineering
I used to say bad version, bad rollout, bad payload. I stopped, because a version isn't good or bad in the abstract. It's a distribution of outcomes across a population of users, configs, and use cases. The same payload can be flawless for 99% and broken for 0.5%, and calling it bad collapses that spectrum onto one label that quietly dictates how you triage, communicate, and remember the…
Fearless Engineering
When I was starting out, hesitation held me back from trying things. Over time it faded, not because I got braver, but because I got a better handle on risk. Fearless engineering is not the absence of caution. It is a calculated read of what you know, what you do not, and how far a change can reach.
9 Years of Copious Notes
Nine years of work notes, from sort-of-daily Markdown files in 2017 to monthly Word docs to a single yearly running document, and how AI agents finally took over the writing through worklogs.
The Word "Impact" Considered Harmful at Work
A reflection on why the word impact is too overloaded for work conversations, and why accomplishments and outcomes are clearer alternatives.
Orthogonal, Not Opposite
Salty is not the opposite of sweet. They are separate receptors, separate dials, and salted caramel exists because you can turn up both at once. Most 'balance' advice is secretly slider-thinking. The method is to catch the false opposite, test for a real tradeoff, and go to the corner everyone told you was impossible.
10,000 Hours Was Never Enough
Time matters, but expertise does not come from time alone. In software engineering, AI makes the missing part impossible to ignore: growth comes from new constraints, real feedback, rising stakes, and ownership of outcomes.
Find Your Why: Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose
Interesting motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic. Mastery (the pull to get better), Autonomy (ownership and a map of what you control), and Purpose (the why that renews) are the three forces that make work gel. Find your why, and let the Quest Engine help you search for a more interesting one.
Why Search Maps to Mastery, Not Autonomy
There's a natural-sounding intuition that autonomy is about exploring, so maybe it lines up with Search. It turns out backwards, and the reason it's backwards is the most useful thing about the framework: the mapping between Search/Drive/Renew and Mastery/Autonomy/Purpose is fixed by when each force acts, not by what its name sounds like.
Context as Code
Configuration earned its place next to code: versioned, reviewed, owned. The corpus of context that aligns a team (design docs, contextual documents, the why behind the system) deserves the same standard. It's the operating system humans run on, and now the grounding agents read to understand how we work.
Minimize Humans as Glue
Tanya Reilly's 'Being Glue' names the invisible human work that holds a team together but never shows up on your own record. The deeper pattern is the same one behind every high-maintenance system: a person standing in for a fix that was never made. The goal is not to be better glue, it is to build systems that heal themselves so humans are needed as glue as rarely as possible.
Team Identity Ownership
Choosing a name is the first step in taking your team's destiny into your own hands. It is the first thing that creates a sense of belonging, and it is often ignored even though it is such a multiplier. Belonging cannot be dictated. It has to be adopted. It has to be organic.
Language Choice in the LLM Era
A practical guide to choosing programming languages for frontend, CLI, and server development with decision matrices that account for modern LLM-assisted development.
Faith. Guts. Stamina.
In Sing 2, an elderly sheep tells Buster Moon: 'Guts, Stamina, Faith.' The order lands perfectly for the moment. It's not the order the forces operate in. Faith belongs first. Guts follows. Stamina closes the loop.
Context Hunting vs Context Gathering
Why the word 'hunting' matters: context doesn't just lie around waiting to be picked up. Real context requires active investigation, tracing code, chasing state transitions, and turning what you found into something the whole team can use.
Determined. Driven. Consistent.
Tom Brady's Hall of Fame answer was three parts: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it. Most people drop the middle one. That missing piece is why you can be determined and consistent and still be moving in the wrong direction.
Set. Action. Reload.
The phrase 'Lights. Camera. Action.' is a one-shot pipeline, not a cycle. Replacing it with 'Set. Action. Reload.' turns it into a generalizable loop that compounds, showing how common phrases can be transformed into better ways of thinking.
The Hero's Journey and the Quest Engine
Joseph Campbell's monomyth (Departure, Initiation, Return) maps naturally onto the Quest Engine's three forces (Searching, Driven, Renewal). The hero's journey is the narrative; the Quest Engine is the operating system.
Knowing, Walking, Returning: Completing the Path Triad
Morpheus told Neo there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. That's two-thirds of a triad. The third move is returning — when you connect the dots, give back what the walk taught you, and become someone who can show others the way.
Quest Engine: Timing, Momentum, and Resonance
Timing and momentum matter more than talent, but there's a third term missing: resonance. This dynamics layer extends the Quest Engine with the physics of coupling (how your sustained force meets the world's readiness to receive it).
Leverage and the Stairs You Build
Archimedes asked for a long enough lever to move the world. Engineering is the discipline of building those levers (correctly sized stairs, daily practice, scaffolded learning, and iterative cycles) so any wall becomes climbable.
Discovery, Play, Joy — A Secular Meaning of Life
Exploring a secular approach to life's meaning through three forces: Discovery (the search for understanding), Play (the drive to engage), and Joy (the renewal of purpose). These aren't abstract ideals — they're diagnostic tools for a life that matters.
Craftsmanship, Judgment, and Taste: What Humans Bring to Agent Collaboration
When working with AI agents, craftsmanship, judgment, and taste are what humans contribute. Craftsmanship builds expertise through exploration, judgment determines what you control versus delegate, and taste guides what's worth building. These map to searching, being driven, and renewal in the Quest Engine.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. — The Mindset Behind the Quest
Tracing the phrase 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog through Steve Jobs' Stanford address to the mindset of permanent, joyful pursuit that drives self-advancement and connects to Quest Engine.
Quest Engine: The Why Behind the How
The Objective Function sits above all operational cycles and defines what success means. Through Search, Drive, and Renew, it ensures humans and agents continuously align on what 'better' looks like, what each can control, and whether they're still optimizing for the right thing.
Quest Engine: A Framework for Agent-Human Collaboration
Quest Engine is a methodology built on three recursive action steps that help you solve problems at any scale. Through Searching, Being Driven, and Renewing (you compound your capability continuously). AI coding agents amplify these natural processes as tools that multiply your leverage.