Occasional writing by Khaled Hawari, of Ottawa, known to most people as Kal Hawari. It belongs to no client and no company.https://khaledhawari.com/en-CAhttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-ask-that-gets-paid/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-ask-that-gets-paid/The letters that worked were not firmer. They were shorter and they asked for one thing.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-first-year-you-store-everything/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-last-ten-percent/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/a-city-whose-largest-employer-is-a-government/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/speaking-better-than-i-write/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/speaking-better-than-i-write/One language, two grades. I spent years assuming the lower one would catch up on its own.Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-first-week-in-a-new-school/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/incorporating-is-not-starting/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/incorporating-is-not-starting/The founding date on the paperwork is the one everybody celebrates, and it is almost never the day anything started.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-interruption-is-not-the-cost/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/deciding-an-error-is-too-small/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-most-consequential-software-ever-written/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/why-people-pay-late/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/why-people-pay-late/Nobody found new money. The penalties fell anyway, which told me the money was never the issue.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/classroom-and-caseload/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-checklist-people-actually-follow/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/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.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-close-taught-me-to-ship/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-close-taught-me-to-ship/Nobody warned me that the discipline transfers. It does, almost completely.Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/three-languages-one-argument/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/three-languages-one-argument/Most disagreements I have watched were two people defending the same position in different vocabulary.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT