Easy Miles
In last year's post I am a Journaler I pulled on a thread that, with the benefit of hindsight, I realized had run through much of my life. Today I'm going to pull on another. I ran my first running race in high school. It was
More issues
When a Golden Path Becomes a Golden Cage
This post is part of the Content Club, organized by Bryan Ross. The theme for November 2025 is "Getting the balance right: golden paths versus golden cages". Links to other posts in this group are at the end of this post.
Platform Engineering is a field that deals
I am a Journaler
In my senior year of high school I take an independent study program, an English class dedicated to a yearlong, student-led, self-defined project. For my project, I construct a language (a "conlang"), producing a descriptive grammar and vocabulary more than a hundred pages long. Part of
The Future of the Rarefied Err Newsletter
I started writing the Rarefied Err newsletter one year ago, and since then I’ve published … one post. One and done. What happened?
In this post I’ll share what I’ve learned about why I haven’t written more, and I’ll let you in on some changes I’
On Team Topologies and Deep Work: Delivering Value at Large Scale and Small Scale
This post is part of the Content Club, organized by Bryan Ross. The theme for February 2025 is "Team Topologies in the Real World". Links to other posts in this group are at the end of this post.
I consider myself a big fan of the book Team
A 2024 Reading Recap
For the last eight years I've set myself a reading goal of twelve books a year. I started this practice the year after I dropped out of a humanities graduate program - I was a voracious reader as a kid, and was reading a ton in graduate school, and
On the New Hugging Face Bluesky Dataset
As an undergraduate linguistics major in New Mexico, I was exposed to not only the languages of present-day America but also to lots of indigenous scholarship and writing on those languages. Some of the most eye-opening, "aha" moments of my college career came from those classes.
f/8 and Be There
During KubeCon week last week I wrote and published four blog posts. If you count this one, written and published on the following Monday, I've published five blog posts in seven days (Tuesday through Monday). Now, while there's nothing particularly impressive about that (none of the
Financial Regulators are Platform Engineers
Yesterday I attended a KubeCon panel that ended up being one of my favorite KubeCon sessions of the week: "Platform Engineering In Financial Institutions: The Practitioner Panel". Moderated by Paula Kennedy (Syntasso), with panelists Chris Plank (NatWest Bank), Suhail Patel (Monzo), Jinhong Brejnholt (Saxo Bank), and Rachael Wonnacott
Platform as a Startup
The idea of treating engineering platforms as products has been getting a lot of traction recently. We're thinking in terms of "platform-as-a-product", we're doing user research and user interviews, we're hiring platform product managers, we're doing A/