Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight At PlatformCon 2026, Kelsey Hightower gave a talk titled ZTA: Zero Token Architecture (a name he admits isn't really a thing, but it sort of is now, isn't it?). The whole idea comes down to: don't outsource your ability to think, just because these tools exist. One of his examples involves working with database tables. Someone teaches an AI agent to build one, then asks it to...
11 days ago • 1 min read
This week on Book Overflow, Pramod Sadalage came on to reflect on Software Architecture: The Hard Parts. He co-wrote it, along with Building Evolutionary Architectures, the book behind Weekly Reflection #19 - Design for Evolution. In our most recent interview, he described a SQL Server database with 287,000 tables. Nobody wanted to touch it, because any change might break something no one knew was connected. Pramod treats that fear as a measurement. It marks where the coupling is hidden. So...
18 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Years ago, I was working at a company that cut head count. My team worried about how we would keep up with the same work. Our manager stopped us and said, "No, we'll do less with less. The company made this decision, and now we will prioritize accordingly." Wisdom There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker, The Effective...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight My favorite debugging story comes from Rob Pike when he recounted a time he was pair programming with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Pike was at the keyboard. When something broke, he'd immediately dive into stack traces, print statements, and the debugger. Ken would simply stand behind him and think, ignoring the code they'd just written. Then, often before Pike had finished reading...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I love solving problems. So when someone brings me one, my first instinct is to hand over the answer. Coaching, mentoring, and being a father have taught me that instinct almost always gets in the way. What people need more than my answer is a rubber duck. In software, a rubber duck is the thing you explain your problem to, out loud, line by line. It never gives advice; it just...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight My wife just got back from a week-long surf trip on the Osa Peninsula here in Costa Rica. I noticed a difference in her right away. For months, I'd let the slow creeping monster of negativity from our industry seep into my personal life. The volatility, the hype, the insanity. I'm not proud of it. Luckily for me, one healthy conversation with the person I love and respect most in...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight A great design is easily hidden by unnecessary features. Design a working system and then: delete, delete, delete. An underrated use of LLMs: instead of cranking out 700 words of slop, ask them what to cut. Wisdom Good design is as little design as possible. Dieter Rams, Ten Principles for Good Design Reflection What feature are you defending that should be deleted? Lagniappe This...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I spend a lot of time writing design documents for software systems these days. Recently, after several hours of spinning my wheels, I reached an "aha" moment. I scrapped half of my work and refined the other half, getting the idea down to its essence. What came out the other side was a software architecture that was deceptively simple, and yet couldn't have existed any other way....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Every Sunday, I fill up the gas tank on our little Suzuki Vitara. I learned this from Tom Limoncelli in Time Management For System Administrators. It doesn't matter if it's a quarter empty or a quarter full. I just top it off. The ritual categorically removes a potential source of stress from my week, all from a simple little habit. Wisdom A schedule defends from chaos and whim....
2 months ago • 1 min read