The DevOps Bottleneck: Moving from "TicketOps" to Platform Engineering
If your DevOps team spends all day closing tickets, you have a scaling problem. How to move from manual provisioning to "The Golden Path."
Perspectives
We dig into history, etymology, and philosophy to find the structural truths that govern our organizations. Whether discussing the architecture of a Flash Sale or the ethics of AI, our goal is the same: to find order in the chaos.
Perspectives
Montaigne: The Power of "I Don't Know" (Epistemic Humility)
"Que sais-je?" (What do I know?). Why the most strategic phrase in business is admitting ignorance. A guide to Epistemic Humility.
The Hiring Bar: Why A-Players Hire A-Players (and B-Players Hire Disasters)
Once you hire a B-Player, the "Bozo Explosion" begins. How to maintain Talent Density using the "Bar Raiser" mechanism and the "Hell Yes" rule.
Sun Tzu: Winning Without Fighting (The Strategy of Asymmetry)
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." How to apply Sun Tzu's concept of Asymmetry and positioning to beat larger competitors.
DevSecOps Realities: Automating Compliance Without Killing Velocity
Security usually slows you down. DevSecOps is the art of making security invisible. How to automate SAST/DAST in your pipeline.
Aristotle’s Phronesis: Why AI Can’t Replace Seniors (The 3 Types of Knowledge)
Techne, Episteme, Phronesis. Why "Senior" engineers are defined by wisdom, not coding speed. A philosophical defense of human judgment in the AI age.
The P&L of a Feature: Stop Building "Squatter" Software
Code is a liability, not an asset. How to calculate the ROI of your engineering roadmap and why you should delete features that don't pay rent.
Dunbar’s Number: The Physics of Trust
Why do companies turn bureaucratic at 150 people? It’s not culture; it’s biology. How to apply Robin Dunbar's "Rule of 150" to organizational design.
AI Governance: Preventing Hallucinations (The "Air Canada" Defense)
The Air Canada chatbot lawsuit changed everything. How to implement Technical Guardrails, Input/Output filters, and "LLM-as-a-Judge" to prevent AI liability.
Stoicism in the Server Room: Emotional Regulation During Outages
Panic is contagious. Calm is a superpower. How to use the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus to survive a 3 AM production outage.
Antifragility: Beyond Resilience
Resilience just resists the shock. Antifragility gets stronger because of it. How to apply Nassim Taleb's philosophy to Engineering Strategy and Risk.
The Peter Principle: Why Competence is Punished
"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Why your best engineers make the worst managers, and how the Dual-Track ladder fixes it.
The RAG Architecture Guide: Building the Pipeline (Beyond the Basics)
RAG is more than just a Vector DB. A technical guide to Chunking Strategies, Hybrid Search, Re-Ranking, and the 5-Stage ETL pipeline for production AI.
Plato’s Cave: Why Users Ask for "Faster Horses"
The user is a prisoner in Plato's Cave. They see shadows (problems) but cannot imagine the sun (solutions). Why "Voice of the Customer" leads to mediocrity.
Goodhart’s Law: When the Measure Becomes the Target (The Cobra Effect)
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Why "Data-Driven" often leads to the Cobra Effect and how to audit your KPIs.
Concept: Chesterton’s Fence — The Dangers of "Cleaning Up"
"Don't remove a fence until you know why it was put there." A mental model for handling legacy code and organizational reform without causing disaster.
Platform Engineering: The End of "Shift Left" (Cognitive Load Strategy)
For the last 10 years, the tech industry has been shouting one slogan: "You Build It, You Run It.
The Socratic Manager: Leading with Questions
If you answer every question your team asks, you are the bottleneck. How to use the Socratic Method to train your team to think for themselves.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: Cannibalize Yourself
Why did Kodak and Nokia die? Not because they were stupid, but because they were "well managed." Clayton Christensen's warning on why you must eat your own lunch.
Ada Lovelace: Poetical Science (The Art of the Polymath)
She was the first programmer, 100 years before the computer. Why modern leaders need "Poetical Science" to bridge the gap between logic and creativity.
Agentic AI: When Software Has "Will"
We are moving from software that "Talks" (LLMs) to software that "Acts" (Agents). The risks and rewards of delegating "Will" to machines.
The OODA Loop: Speed as a Weapon (And the Myth of the "Fast" Company)
It's not just a circle. It's a way to break your competitor's mind. The deep history of John Boyd and the "Decision Velocity Audit" for executives.