Essays

Pragmatism as Engineering Philosophy: James and Dewey

American pragmatism holds that truth is what works and inquiry transforms problems into solutions. 72% of engineers already decide based on what works. Pragmatism deserves explicit adoption.

Time Series Data Requires Its Own Architecture

Migrating time series from PostgreSQL to TimescaleDB reduced query latency by 78% and storage by 62%. Time series access patterns need purpose-built architecture.

The Paradox of Automation: Why More Creates More Human Work

Bainbridge's 1983 paradox of automation intensifies: organizations with high automation employ 15% more people in automation-adjacent roles. Automation does not replace human work. It transforms and expands it.

Decision fatigue and the case for algorithmic defaults

Levinas and the Face of the User: Ethics Precedes Design

Levinas argued that the encounter with another person's vulnerability precedes all systems. Every interface interaction is an ethical encounter, whether the designer acknowledges it or not.

The Ship of Theseus and Continuous Deployment

The average application replaces 97% of its code within 5 years. The Ship of Theseus reveals that system identity is narrative continuity and purpose, not material composition.

The Paradox of Automation: Why More Creates More Human Work

Bainbridge's 1983 paradox of automation intensifies: organizations with high automation employ 15% more people in automation-adjacent roles. Automation does not replace human work. It transforms and expands it.

Technology as an extension of stoic practice: Tools for attention, not distraction

State Management Is the Hardest Problem in Distributed Systems

Across 31 distributed system failures investigated, 84% traced to state management decisions: split-brain conditions, stale caches, and concurrent update conflicts. State is where distributed systems break.

What stoicism gets wrong about technology, and what it gets right