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/what-survives-compression/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-survives-compression/The number that leaves the room is the one I said. The confidence attached to it is not, and I never once sent that part.Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/credentials-as-a-shape-of-belonging/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/credentials-as-a-shape-of-belonging/You are admitted to a professional body. Nobody says certified by one, and the verb has been telling the truth the whole time.Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/saying-not-launched-out-loud/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/saying-not-launched-out-loud/A financial statement tells you what it is before it tells you anything. A sentence about your own work carries no such label.Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-week-is-arbitrary-and-runs-everything/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-week-is-arbitrary-and-runs-everything/I planned in months for about a decade and then in weeks. The work did not change. What I could see about it did.Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/averages-hide-the-thing-you-need/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/averages-hide-the-thing-you-need/The figure gets chosen because it communicates, and then gets used to decide. Nobody notices the substitution happening.Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/software-replaces-the-memory-of-why/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/software-replaces-the-memory-of-why/Losing a rule and its reason is recoverable. Keeping the rule and losing the reason is not, and it is the normal case.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/nobody-wants-a-range/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/nobody-wants-a-range/The high end never leaves the room. Only the low one travels, and it travels without you.Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-a-beginner-can-still-see/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-a-beginner-can-still-see/I have been a genuine newcomer twice, eleven years apart, and the second time I could feel the signal switching off.Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/defining-quality-before-anyone-asks/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/defining-quality-before-anyone-asks/The checks were the easy part. The document's real content was one number, and I had no authority to choose it.Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/two-universities-in-one-city/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/two-universities-in-one-city/The rivalry is not about teaching. It is about two address books that overlap and never merge.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/jargon-is-a-membership-test/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/jargon-is-a-membership-test/There is a test that separates a real term of art from a password, and it takes about four seconds to run.Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-honest-answer-is-long/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-honest-answer-is-long/The question wants a word. What I have is an order of events, and the two are not convertible.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/building-something-that-has-not-launched/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/building-something-that-has-not-launched/Every job I have had returned a signal every month. This one returns nothing, and I did not know how much I was leaning on that.Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/why-businesses-have-anniversaries/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/why-businesses-have-anniversaries/The date is not chosen because it is meaningful. It is useful precisely because it is not.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/a-number-with-no-owner/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/a-number-with-no-owner/I asked where a line came from and got a name. The name had left the company two years earlier.Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/dashboards-create-demand-for-dashboards/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/dashboards-create-demand-for-dashboards/Nobody planned an estate of a hundred workbooks. It accreted, one perfectly reasonable request at a time.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/round-numbers-get-approved/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/round-numbers-get-approved/The figure I had derived carefully got three questions. The one I had put in as a placeholder got a nod.Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/learning-by-fixing-other-peoples-mistakes/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/learning-by-fixing-other-peoples-mistakes/A broken set of books is a teaching problem somebody has already solved for you, at their own expense.Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-an-estimate-actually-is/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-an-estimate-actually-is/Two people can say three days and mean completely unrelated things, and the number hides which one you are talking to.Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/a-river-that-is-a-border/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/a-river-that-is-a-border/The crossing takes a few minutes and changes the law that applies to you. Nothing about the crossing tells you so.Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/accounting-is-a-language-with-no-native-speakers/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/accounting-is-a-language-with-no-native-speakers/Nobody grew up speaking this. Every fluent speaker in the room acquired it late, on purpose, and can remember doing it.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-a-name-does-in-an-inbox/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-a-name-does-in-an-inbox/The first thing anyone reads is not my first sentence. It is the from field, and I did not write that.Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/decisions-that-outlast-the-decision/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/decisions-that-outlast-the-decision/The choices that turned out to be permanent were not the ones that felt important while we were making them.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/time-in-business-is-lumpy/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/time-in-business-is-lumpy/A month is not thirty days of work. It is a few days of work and a long approach to them.Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/false-precision/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/false-precision/The format of a number is an assertion, and it is usually one I had not checked before publishing it.Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/copy-paste-was-the-first-automation/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/copy-paste-was-the-first-automation/Nothing in a duplicated file records where it came from, so an error does not just spread. It spreads into a structure that has forgotten how it was assembled.Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/budgets-are-promises/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/budgets-are-promises/The reason a missed budget feels like a betrayal rather than an error is that it is one.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/every-tool-teaches-a-different-model/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/every-tool-teaches-a-different-model/Whatever appears in all six systems belongs to the field. Whatever appears in one is a vendor's opinion delivered in the grammar of a rule.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/work-that-someone-else-can-run/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/work-that-someone-else-can-run/You cannot sit the test while you are still in the building, which is why so much admired work fails it invisibly.Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/kanata-is-two-places/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/kanata-is-two-places/I correctly identified two Kanatas and then pointed a practice at the one that could not see me.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/two-versions-of-the-same-agreement/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/two-versions-of-the-same-agreement/Ambiguity survives comfortably in one language and dies the moment you have to say it twice.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/culture-as-a-set-of-defaults/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/culture-as-a-set-of-defaults/A default is invisible to whoever shares it and glaring to whoever does not, which is why culture is only ever visible from outside it.Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-first-customer/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-first-customer/One payment is a real fact about the world and a much smaller one than it feels like on the day.Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-calendar-is-a-moral-document/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/the-calendar-is-a-moral-document/Whatever anyone says they value, the schedule is the record of what actually got protected, and it is not usually flattering.Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/rounding-is-a-choice/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/rounding-is-a-choice/The rounding rule is the one part of a schedule nobody documents, which is exactly why it is worth looking at.Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-a-formula-hides/https://khaledhawari.com/essays/what-a-formula-hides/The property that makes a spreadsheet usable and the property that makes it unauditable are the same property, which is why it has never been solved.Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://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