The Journal
Essays
Long-form writing on AI, philosophy, psychology, and systems thinking.
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The Automation of Judgment
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Your Data Catalog Is Lying to You
An audit of 3 enterprise data catalogs found that 38% of table descriptions were inaccurate and 22% of documented columns no longer existed. Catalogs create false confidence.
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Runbooks Are the Most Undervalued Documentation
Incidents with current runbooks resolved 62% faster, with median resolution of 23 minutes versus 61 minutes without. Runbooks matter most when cognition is most impaired.
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Complexity Budgets: Treating System Complexity as a Finite Resource
Teams that allocated explicit complexity budgets reduced accidental complexity by 38% over 12 months, measured by glue code, integration adapters, and operational runbook length.
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Database Architecture Decisions Outlast Every Other Technical Choice
In 22 systems, database decisions made in the first 3 months remained the most constraining technical choice 5 to 10 years later. Only 3 ever migrated, at an average cost of 7.4 engineering months.
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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.
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The Ethics of AI-Generated Content at Scale
AI systems generate an estimated 15% of all web content daily. When content production outpaces human evaluation, the epistemic environment degrades for everyone.
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Event-Driven Architecture and Asynchronous Systems
Event-driven architecture succeeds by accepting that distributed systems are inherently asynchronous. Fighting this truth with synchronous abstractions causes cascading failures.
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Building Data Pipelines That Survive Schema Changes
Schema-resilient pipeline patterns reduced failures from 4.3 per month to zero over 9 months. Pipelines that assume schemas will change survive longer.
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The Veil of Ignorance in System Architecture
Rawls's veil of ignorance removes self-interest from design. If you did not know which user you would be, the system would be fairer. 96.3% of top websites fail accessibility tests.