The Layer Tax: Every Abstraction Has a Price
Every abstraction layer has a cost. Benchmarks showing the real price of convenience from someone who built fast systems in the 90s and slow ones today....
Why AI Can't Count the R's in Strawberry
LLMs confidently say strawberry has two R's because they've never seen letters—only tokens. This tokenization blindness predicts where AI will fail....
When CompuServe Was the Internet
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and chat for 3 million users before the web. The community-building lessons from that era—invested moderators, friction as a feature, human-scale communities—remain...
Crypto Is Bad in All Sorts of Ways
Environmental destruction, greater fool economics, regulatory arbitrage, and ransomware's favorite payment method. The SEC was right all along....
The Inventions I Never Shipped
Over 45 years, I noticed a pattern: I keep building things that later become billion-dollar companies. This is less about timing and more about recognizing when something you built for yourself might ...
The Best Code I Ever Wrote Was Deleted
The hardest skill in software engineering isn't writing code - it's knowing when to delete it. Stories of systems that improved by subtraction....
FidoNet: The Internet Before the Internet
FidoNet was a global network connecting thousands of BBSs via scheduled phone calls. Email, newsgroups, file distribution - everything we associate with the internet existed first on FidoNet....
Barren Realms Elite and the Golden Age of BBS Door Games
Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite - BBS door games created the template for online gaming. First-person perspective from a SysOp who ran them....
What the Navy Taught Me About Perspective
I joined the Navy at 18 and got deployed to Desert Shield right out of boot camp. No combat heroics - just years on ships, traveling the world, and being part of the Missouri's decommissioning crew. T...
The Integration Tax: Every API Has a Price
Third-party API integration costs 56% more than initial estimates when you account for maintenance, breaking changes, and troubleshooting. The integration tax is real and ongoing....
Technical Debt Is a People Problem, Not a Code Problem
Technical debt accumulates because of organizational dysfunction - pressure to ship, fear of refactoring, knowledge silos. Research shows 91% of CTOs cite it as a top challenge....
I Solved Spam in the 90s (Nobody Cared)
In the 1990s, I built RUM (Real User Mail) - a challenge-response system to fight spam. It worked. I never released it. Years later, the industry reinvented it....
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