Essays
Occasional writing that belongs to no client and no company. Nothing here is about tax and nothing here is about marketing operations; those have their own homes and their own standards of proof. This is the other thing.
The ask that gets paid
The letters that worked were not firmer. They were shorter and they asked for one thing.
The first year you store everything
The exhaustion of the early years is not inefficiency. It is the raw material, and there is no way to acquire it cheaply.
The last ten percent
The build finished on time. The handover did not, and only one of those two things was ever in the plan.
A city whose largest employer is a government
It is not that people here are cautious. It is that the thing they are comparing against is unusually good.
Speaking better than I write
One language, two grades. I spent years assuming the lower one would catch up on its own.
The first week in a new school
The newcomer learns to infer rules from behaviour, because nobody in an established room will ever state them.
Registering a company is not starting one
The founding date on the paperwork is the one everybody celebrates, and it is almost never the day anything started.
The interruption is not the cost
What an interruption destroys is not time. It is a stack of provisional explanations nobody wrote down, including me.
Deciding an error is too small
A profession that writes down in advance which of its mistakes it will not correct is doing something most fields refuse to do.
The most consequential software ever written
Not arithmetic. Not storage. The grid made changing your mind about a number free, and everything follows from that.
Why people pay late
Nobody found new money. The penalties fell anyway, which told me the money was never the issue.
Classroom and caseload
I expected the degree and the casework to converge. They never did, and the gap between them is where the useful part was.
The checklist people actually follow
I have inherited a lot of written procedure. Almost none of it was in use, and the tell was never the content.
The close taught me to ship
Nobody warned me that the discipline transfers. It does, almost completely.
Three languages, one argument
Most disagreements I have watched were two people defending the same position in different vocabulary.