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Engineering is the only profession that names its failures after the places where they happened. Doctors have "complications". Economists have "corrections". Engineers have Tacoma Narrows, Chernobyl, Challenger, the Hyatt Regency walkway. There is nowhere to hide when your mistake is 300 metres long and visible from the highway. That brutal public accountability produced something unusual - a body…
Alexander at the Hyphasis, 326 BCE - the finest motivational talk in antiquity, and why it bounced Alexander the Great never lost a battle. He lost exactly one argument, to exhausted men standing in the rain, and the speech he gave to win that argument remains, twenty-three centuries later, the most complete syllabus of leadership rhetoric ever compressed into a single address. Every trope is…
Or - how the software industry spent fifty years perfecting a relay race, only to discover it was a sprint, run by one person Somewhere right now, a project manager is updating a Gantt chart for a feature an AI agent finished last Tuesday. The chart says "Requirements Phase - 3 weeks". The requirements were gathered in a two-hour exhaustive ai interview, turned into a spec before lunch,…
Kanbanize Now! Or - how we kept running two week sprints while our robots shipped in two hours A confession before we start Somewhere right now, a team is holding a sprint planning session to decide what four agents will do over the next fourteen days. The agents finished it during the meeting. Nobody has told the humans, because the humans are busy playing planning poker over a story that has…
From the Lyceum to the Standup Or, how to flourish while the industry is transforming Two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle wandered the shaded walkways of the Lyceum asking what it means to live well. He concluded it was eudaimonia - human flourishing - achieved by exercising our distinctive capacity for reason, excellently. He reached this conclusion while strolling in the open air,…
A man does not get himself killed for a few half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify the man. Napoleon Bonaparte Napoleon, who once persuaded several hundred thousand people to march cheerfully toward cannon fire, understood something that every manager with a budget spreadsheet keeps rediscovering and then forgetting with each generation.…
The Cosine Is Coming From Inside Your Phone A field guide for parents ambushed by the question - why should I learn trigonometry? The question arrives on schedule, somewhere between dinner and despair. The homework is open. A triangle sits on the page, radiating menace. Beside it, the words SOH CAH TOA, which sound less like mathematics and more like a small island you would visit to forget…
Why selling time in the age of AI is a slow-motion resignation letter The billable hour deserves a moment of silence. Six minutes should do it - someone can invoice the rest. For decades it was the load-bearing wall of knowledge work. Lawyers built empires on it. Consultants turned it into theology. Freelancers, contractors and gig workers inherited it the way you inherit a grandfather clock -…
On why most of your hard problems were already solved by a fish, a mammal, and soon, an open-source solution The fish and the mammal who took the same exam Put a dolphin next to a shark. Same torpedo body, same dorsal fin, same general business of being the thing other animals do not want to be downstream of. You would assume close cousins. You would be off by about 300 million years and an entire…
There is a particular kind of person who, upon meeting a champion racehorse, immediately asks how fast it can run a quarter mile. Magnificent animal. Tremendous lungs. Genuinely the fastest thing on four legs you will ever stand beside. And also, if you hand it a field and a plow and ask it to feed a village, completely useless until somebody invents the harness. We are all, collectively, standing…