Writing
Things I’ve been thinking about.
This page also pulls in some older writing from my old site, Medium, and an old Tumblr that I think is lost to the internet.
How Poppy connects agent identity, account authorization and execution
A technical review of Poppy’s working 0.3 draft: discovery, JWT assertions, DPoP session keys, OAuth grants, browser and conversation boundaries, and operation recovery.
What should your bank let an AI assistant do on your behalf?
Banks are right to restrict agents they cannot control, but customers need a way to delegate specific financial tasks without handing over the authority of an entire login.
Billy Evans is the real subject of You Can See Everything
A beautiful film about people I found pretty repulsive, and why Billy Evans’s attempts at control left me less certain about who was influencing whom.
Banks need shared controls before they give agents more authority
Banks should make shared financial controls a condition of expanding agent pilots. Waiting until agents are embedded across departments makes the problem harder and more expensive to fix.
I wanted more from Grace Hopper, but its cancellation still unsettles me
Revisiting my 2014 criticism of Grace Hopper after this year’s cancellation, and why losing spaces like it will make it harder for women to stay and advance in tech.
Why LinkedIn feels the way it does now
People want to feel important, find community, and stay employable. AI has made it much easier to turn those needs into a constant stream of posts.
Venture capital is booming. For whom?
Record U.S. venture investment is concentrated in AI and large funds. That is a very different story from an easier market for most founders.
Physical AI will be won by boring integration
Better robot intelligence matters, but the harder commercial test is getting robots to work reliably inside real factories.
AI made writing code cheap. Review is now the bottleneck.
Coding agents can produce more changes than a team can thoughtfully absorb. Engineering leaders need to design for verification.
AI agents are relearning what payments already learned
What payment systems already know about uncertainty, idempotency, partial completion, authority, and reconciliation matters even more when agents can move money.
Engineering team design in the agentic coding era
AI can make code cheaper to produce without making software delivery proportionally cheaper. That changes how I think about team size, seniority, review, and ownership.
The web is becoming an unstable dependency for AI assistants
I liked Meta Muse more than I expected. Two weeks later, I was already running into the thing that may limit assistants like it: the web does not have to cooperate.
KEDA gets more interesting in the accelerator era
KEDA could get a lot more useful as Kubernetes gets better at scheduling GPUs and other accelerators.
More people are built to scale than build
Starting from zero and improving something that already works are different entrepreneurial skills. I increasingly think more people are suited to the second than we usually assume.
Too much feeling, not enough restraint
I liked what Fredrik Backman was trying to do more than I liked the book itself.
The control boundary for agents in software delivery
The important decision is not whether an agent can deploy. It is where the company chooses to put authority, review, and production access.
When the system finally stops working for you
Belle Burden's divorce memoir is compelling, but I kept getting stuck on how often she seemed surprised by dynamics she had been unusually well equipped to question.
I am not sure the SpaceX deal was good for Cursor
The acquisition makes financial sense and gives Cursor enormous compute. I am less convinced it makes sense for the product Cursor had become.
The harder parts of senior-heavy teams
Strong teams can still be badly shaped. Senior-heavy teams often trade execution strength for ambiguity around ownership, influence, and opportunity.
What meritocracy makes failure mean
Status Anxiety is strongest when it asks what happens when a society tells us that where we end up is what we deserve.
A few Redis anti-patterns I’ve seen in practice
Most Redis problems I’ve seen were not really Redis problems. They were access-pattern problems that quietly turned cheap operations into expensive ones.
A month out of Haas
I don't regret doing an MBA, but I think the value of one is different now and much harder to reduce to a clean ROI calculation.
The myth of the resourceful child
Jeannette Walls's memoir is fascinating, sad, and incredibly frustrating on behalf of the children in it.
GameStop feels like more than a trade
The GameStop frenzy is messy, speculative, and probably dangerous for some people. It also feels like retail investors discovering that, collectively, they can matter.
How to Design Your Homebrew IoT Solution With Security in Mind
If your garage project has a chance of hitting shelves, you’ll want to keep your users safe from the start.
Originally posted on Medium
Rolling funds make venture feel more like software
AngelList's new rolling fund structure makes starting and growing a venture fund feel much more continuous, flexible, and internet-native.
A quick mental model for AWS ECS
ECS gets much easier to reason about once you separate clusters, services, tasks, task definitions, and the EC2 instances underneath them.
You Can’t Build an iPhone With Python
On the narrow definition of engineering perpetuated by boot camps and other coding initiatives.
Originally posted on Medium
On twenty-two years of loving DC Comics, and four of moderating its largest fan subreddit.
On growing up with DC Comics, the characters that stuck with me, and eventually helping moderate r/DCcomics.
Show Me How You Think
Why critical reasoning should be tested in interviews.
Fruits. Grains. Nuts. Dal. Paneer.
Why I stayed vegetarian even after it became a choice.
The Microsoft Program Manager role doesn't know what it wants to be
After working as a PM in two very different parts of Windows, I still can't tell you what a Microsoft Program Manager is actually supposed to be.
Why pick you?
Ways not to answer this dreaded question in pitches and interviews.
Grace Hopper sucked lol
I was really excited to go to Grace Hopper in Phoenix. I left feeling weirdly disappointed by the whole thing.
More fun with JS: Hacking away shallow copy issues
A small JavaScript hack I used for cloning arrays.
Device Events with Javascript: Detecting a Shake
Experimenting with the Device Motion Event API to detect a shake in a mobile web app.
Dismissive of (Non-Tech) Design
Why engineers can be too quick to dismiss design and innovation outside technology.