Why I went back to the keyboard

I left a CTO chair to be in the code again, at exactly the moment the industry decided code was the part that no longer needed a person.

Election day does not move

I ran digital for three national campaigns. Election day is set by law, and it taught me more about shipping than any methodology has.

Stop the run at the first wrong sentence

The highest-value thing I do with an agent is read its output in real time and stop it the second it says something incongruent. Every trend in tooling pushes the other way.

One round trip per day

Six years leading engineers in Pune and the Philippines taught me to write specifications for someone I could not interrupt. It turns out that is the same skill as directing an agent.

Sixteen years, and they took the account

I created @music on Twitter in 2007 and ran it until 2023, when X took it back. There was no appeal, because there is never an appeal.

The org chart assumed typing was the bottleneck

Team structure, headcount planning, and career ladders were all designed around a constraint that no longer binds.

The title was CTO, the job was translation

The CTO job was less architecture diagrams than making the same facts make sense to a board, a carrier CIO, support, and engineers far away.

register_globals and the whole catastrophe

I have written PHP since 1999, on version 4. Twenty-seven years of watching confident practice become embarrassing is a specific kind of training.