Strategy & History
Ancient strategy, historical patterns, and older ideas applied to modern software work.
← All dispatchesA Fighter Pilot Is Hiding in Your Engineering Practices
Scrum, CI/CD, postmortems, and now agent loops all share one skeleton. A fighter pilot most engineers have never heard of sharpened it, and the part everyone keeps dropping is the part that matters.
Roman Virtues for Engineering Leaders
Engineering leadership is tested under pressure. The old Roman virtues give us a useful language for the practical behaviors leaders need when the system gets hard.
The Stoic Engineering Leader
You inherited the codebase you inherited. Leadership starts when you stop being offended by reality and start improving what is within your practical grasp.
The Art of Software Development
Good engineering strategy makes brute force unnecessary. Five lessons from Sun Tzu show how roadmaps, measurement, terrain, constraints, and systems turn struggling teams into predictable ones.
Software Development Has Always Been Moving in One Direction
From assembly to compilers to frameworks to AI: software development keeps moving toward higher abstraction, faster feedback, and clearer intent.