Tag: technical debt
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Second Place
Photo by Riho Kitagawa on Unsplash The report had been running longer than anyone currently responsible for it. It wasn’t sophisticated: a few pages, a handful of filters, and a set of numbers that a team opened every week to track progress against a defined target. Nobody thought of it as architecture. People thought of…
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Drawing Dead | An Architect’s Perspective on the Enterprise AI Bet
Photo by Julian Gojani on Unsplash You know what you are holding. Two cards, face down, and you have looked at them enough times to stop looking. You know the rules of the game, which hands beat which, and roughly how often the deck cooperates. You know how many chips are on your side of…
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Cultivating Revenue
Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash Author’s Note: This week’s article deliberately steps a little outside the usual language of boardrooms, business schools, and technical architecture. The metaphor that follows comes instead from the fiction I read and the games I play. That is intentional. An idea’s origin tells us something about its context, but…
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Borrowed Simplicity
Photo by Jonathan Phillips on Unsplash Somewhere in every mature platform there exists an object no one will delete. It could be a table, a view, a scheduled job, or a permission granted to a group that no longer matches any team on the org chart. It is probably not documented, and it is not…
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The Second Ledger
Photo by Mason on Unsplash One of the best programs I ever built had no defensible methodology. It was a recognition application developed for a sales and customer service team in a former role. Every manager received a monthly budget of points and the discretion to award them: for staying late, for covering someone else’s…
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The Meter is a Map
Photo by Tyler on Unsplash Author’s Note When I published The Token Tax three weeks ago, I expected the cost conversation around enterprise AI to keep growing. I did not expect it to accelerate this quickly. In the time since, the same pattern has surfaced across the industry in plain view: companies exhausting an entire…
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The Fractal Delusion: Why Motion Isn’t Proof
From the road, it looks like progress. A project site at full stride has a particular kind of confidence to it. Steel ribs climb into the sky. Concrete trucks arrive on schedule. Cranes swing slow, deliberate arcs, placing beams where they belong as if the building is assembling itself. You can stand at the fence…
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Your Infrastructure Is Lying to You
Photo by Brian Kelly on Unsplash Every company that grows quickly builds roads to connect where they are with where they want to go. At first, those roads are simple: gravel tracks carved out of necessity, meant to get people and goods moving with minimal delay. They’re not elegant, but they’re fast. They serve their…
