The archive
Writing
Long-form notes on systems, agents, and the craft around them. No cadence, no content calendar — things get written when I’ve actually learned something.
14 posts
The harness is the asset: a product lifecycle run as agents
An agent is a composition — persona, rules, skills, tools — and all of it belongs in the repository. Notes on running a whole product development lifecycle as cooperating agents, and on when parallel is the wrong call.
The substation is becoming a server, and the grid is becoming a platform
I started my career writing software for electricity distribution utilities, where the substation was hardware you configured. Two launches this February make clear that assumption is inverting — and the hard part is the same one it has always been.
The IoT stack has quietly stopped being interesting — and that is the good news
Connectivity, identity, edge inference and OTA have all converged on boring answers. After a decade of bespoke everything, the fleet problems that remain are organisational, not technical.
The software-defined vehicle is an integration problem wearing a compute costume
Zonal architecture, service-oriented in-vehicle networks and central compute get the attention. The thing that actually decides whether a programme ships is whether four organisations can agree on an interface.
AI in automotive: three different industries wearing one buzzword
Perception stacks, cabin assistants and warranty analytics share a phrase and almost nothing else — different data, different risk, different economics. Conflating them is how budgets get spent badly.
The aftermarket runs on data it does not own
Independent repair built an industry on a diagnostic port that is quietly being replaced by an API somebody else controls. The technical question — in-vehicle interface or extended vehicle — decides who gets paid.
Banking infrastructure changed more in five years than the previous twenty
Real-time rails, richer message formats and tokenised credentials each look like a migration project. Together they invalidate assumptions the core was built on — starting with the idea that settlement happens later.
Healthcare finally has interoperability. It turns out that was the easy part
FHIR won, national exchange frameworks exist, and data moves between organisations that used to fax. The remaining problems are semantics, workflow and the fact that a shared record is not a shared understanding.
Life sciences software: where GxP meets the model
Structure prediction changed what the lab asks of software, and validated-system rules changed what software is allowed to do. Reconciling continuous delivery with computerised system validation is the defining problem of the decade.
Six agents, one migration: what a gated pipeline actually looks like
A multi-agent system that migrates services off a legacy workflow engine. The code generation was never the hard part — the approval gates and the state model were.
The seam is the system
A service boundary is a bet about which parts of your business change together. Most teams place that bet by accident, along the shape of the org chart that existed the week the project started.
CQRS was the answer. What was the question?
Splitting reads from writes fixed a real problem under real telemetry load. It also cost more than the pattern's advocates admit — here is the ledger, both columns.
The architecture review I get wrong most often
After a few hundred design reviews, the failure is almost never technical. It is that I answered the question instead of finding out why it was being asked.
The case for a hobby that isn't code
The engineers whose judgement I trust most all take something entirely unrelated to software seriously. I do not think that is a coincidence, and it is not really a wellness argument.