The other half
Nobody is an architecture diagram all the way down. Here’s what fills the rest of it — the things that keep the work honest and occasionally solve its hardest problems by accident.
The sport I grew up on and still make time for. There is a reason so many engineers love cricket: it is a game of long-running state, subtle rule interactions, and decisions whose consequences arrive four hours later.
Andhra food, mostly, with whatever Ontario grocery stores will give me. Cooking is the one system where I am happy to skip the design doc and iterate live.
I keep a shelf of the ones that changed how I think — about systems, about organisations, about attention. The technical ones age fast. The others do not.
Ontario in October is an unreasonably good argument for living here. Long drives are also where most of my architectural problems quietly solve themselves.
Not landscapes. Doorways, signage, the way light lands on a parking garage at 5pm. A useful habit for anyone whose job is noticing structure.
The part of my job I would keep if I had to give up the rest. Explaining something until it clicks for someone else is how I find out whether I actually understood it.
Because the best engineers I’ve worked with were never only engineers. The instinct that tells you a design is wrong before you can articulate why is built from everything else you pay attention to. So this page stays.
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