When to Kill Your Company
Knowing when to shut down is harder than knowing when to start. The sunk cost fallacy kills more founders than failure....
Why I Stopped Giving Advice
Most advice fails, and not because it is wrong. The gap between the giver's context and the receiver's reality is where well-meaning guidance goes to die....
Grace Hopper's Nanosecond: The Wire That Explains Everything
Grace Hopper's famous nanosecond wire demonstration—and why understanding physical constraints still matters for every system we build today....
Watching a Friend Get Hacked in 1987
A 1987 BBS breach taught me about trust models, intrusion detection, and why security-through-obscurity always fails eventually....
The Dot-Com Crash From Inside
First-person account of running Core Logic Software during the 2000-2002 dot-com crash....
The USS Missouri's First Drone Surrender
During the Gulf War, Iraqi troops surrendered to the USS Missouri's Pioneer UAV - the first surrender to a drone in history....
The Anatomy of a Production Outage
The pattern behind production outages: the 2am alert, the escalating panic, the decision that makes it worse....
The Technical Co-Founder Burnout Nobody Talks About
Technical co-founders face unique pressures: irreversible architecture decisions, constant translation duty, recognition gaps, and always-on responsibility....
My Web Crawler Crashed a Server at Los Alamos
How a homemade web crawler in 1993 crashed a Los Alamos server, the birth of robots.txt, and why AI companies are breaking the web etiquette that held for 30 years....
What Text Adventures Taught Me About Software
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
Why I Spent $0 on Patents for 20 Years - Then Filed Everything
When patents matter (defensive portfolios, M&A leverage, licensing revenue) and when they're a distraction....
When CompuServe Was the Internet (1985-1995)
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and real-time chat for three million users a decade before the open web. The platform-as-internet pattern keeps returning....
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