The Reading List

Six months into my first Technical Lead role, my manager told me my team feared me. A brutally honest story about command-and-control, Dale Carnegie, and the long road to becoming a leader worth following.

My first architecture design was rejected in fifteen minutes. What my chief architect did next – and the five questions every engineer must answer before making the leap to architect.

Plot ten thousand whole numbers by one simple rule and the primes fall into spiral arms. An interactive reflection on order, the limits of prediction, a father’s hope, and the prime numbers quietly guarding the modern world.

Some of the objects in that database were thousands of years old; my code was months old. On building collections software for museums like the MET – and designing records meant to outlive the software that holds them.

Everything in modern AI traces back to the search engine you already know. Tokens, attention, vector retrieval, ranking – the vocabulary changed in 2017, the problems did not. A real search engine taken apart into the algorithms that became AI, each one playable inline.

The most orderly city on earth throws itself into festivals all year. On Tokyo’s structure, its spotless streets, the matsuri that are its exhale, and seven Japanese words for living well.

Seven years at i2c moving other people’s money: generating card numbers, guarding everything that made a cardholder a person (PIN, CVC, the data vault), and transfers students were counting on. A declined card is never just an error code.

What the most credible AI forecasting work – the AI Futures Project, the AI-2027 scenario, METR’s time-horizon data, and the labs’ own numbers – actually says about the next three years. No hype, no doom. Forecasts, error bars, and what to do about them.

“Once we move to the cloud, we will have one hundred percent uptime.” I have heard it in too many rooms. Availability is a chain from the ISP to your last deploy – the field lesson from an AZ failure, the math behind the nines, and designing for failure instead of chasing a number.

Nothing worth keeping was ever built by one decision. A bookish boy, eighteen years of ordinary Tuesdays, and the quiet mathematics of showing up again tomorrow.