How to Manage Progress Without Managing Presence
Leaders reach for presence management when they lack a system that can see progress. The fix is operating design — not trust, ideology, or more meetings.
Articles
Article Archive
Original writing and migrated articles from previous publishing homes.
Microsoft, Claude Code, and Strategic Distillation
A short read on why Microsoft's Claude Code rollout may have been less of a failed experiment and more of an R&D shortcut for improving Copilot.
Enforcing Guardrails in Claude Code
Practical Claude Code guardrails for blocking dangerous shell commands, protecting secrets, requiring Terraform plan review, and enforcing test checks.
From Ticket Throughput to Product Responsibility
What the Product Engineer owns in 2026: product intent, agent pipelines, testing completeness, compliance, and production outcomes.
Owning Value in the Age of AI: Why Engineering Must Move Beyond Ticket Velocity
Why AI pushes engineering teams beyond ticket velocity and toward ownership of intent, judgment, quality, and delivered value.
Publication: Expanded Targeted Preconception Screening
A short note on my Journal of Medical Genetics publication about expanded targeted carrier screening and why data-driven family planning matters.
Striking the Balance: Quality, Time, and the "Uniqueness Factor" in Projects
How managers can balance quality, time, budget, and originality when deciding what makes a project worth building differently.
Ninja frame
A heavy timber frame built from reclaimed European oak railroad tracks. Hand-cut mortise-and-tenon joinery throughout — material that spent decades under trains, given a second purpose.
How We Built a Scalable, Secure, and Serverless SaaS Platform in Just 7 Weeks
A practical look at building Nova, a secure serverless SaaS platform for identity and physical access management, in seven weeks.
Features x Quality = Time
A short product planning reminder: features times quality equals time, and changing one side of the equation changes the others.
Eucalyptus floating shelf
A live-edge eucalyptus plank from the same fell tree, mounted as a floating shelf on concealed steel pins. Nothing visible from the front.
real time cloud dashboards, pubnub to the rescue
There are many scenarios that require a UI to be updated with long processes and / or stuff that goes on in the cloud - that require a special polling or infrastructure to communicate the information from the cloud to the browser / client UI. In serverless paradigms, this is a pain as "polling" for [...]
Browser POST to S3, serverless style
Uploading to S3 is very useful, but requires authorization and/or permissions set on the bucket access, and achieving this from a plain old browser is a pain as it requires the POST to be approved and signed prior to sending it to the bucket. All the implementations I have found require a server side component [...]
Eucalyptus large mirror frame
A large hand-carved mirror frame from the same fell eucalyptus tree as the bowl, shelf, and coffee table. The relief carving covers the full surround — organic forms cut by hand into the warm orange-red wood.
Making a wooden coffee mug fit for a carpenter
No process pix, sorry. This started as a piece of firewood, I saw it in a pile of firewood and just had to salvage it. It is Indian Rosewood, and it was beautiful. Indian Rosewood is really hard to carve, but it was worth it all - for it was a present I made with [...]
Huge eucalyptus coffee table
A massive live-edge slab from a single fell eucalyptus tree, cross-cut to show the full width, finished to reveal deep orange-red heartwood and decades of growth rings.
A squarish gift bowl
This was a brazilian hardwood that was leftover from a staircase build - and was thrown for firewood. I had to give it a new purpose All handmade with love 🙂
Some woodworks of 2017-8
A bowl made from reclaimed wood from a forest fire we had a few years ago... It is made from North Indian Rosewood
Backing up wordpress to S3 bucket with cron
So after doing several scripts for backing up wordpress to various places, and primarily S3 buckets, I figured I better put the script here so it is easier for me to find it the next time, and maybe it will be useful for you too 🙂 “Before you act for the greater good, you should [...]
Reclaimed quarry stone stairs
Garden stairs built from limestone blocks quarried at a quarry Baron Rothschild established around 130 years ago. Long closed, the stone available as salvage — warm, golden, and heavier than it looks.
Eucalyptus bowl
A hand-shaped bowl from a single eucalyptus tree that came down in the neighbourhood. The warm red-orange grain and the cracks that sealed as it dried.
Rosewood bowl
A hand-carved bowl in North Indian rosewood — over 40cm wide, with a live edge and deep burl figure. Reclaimed from a forest fire. Rosewood is extremely hard; this was entirely by hand.
Sushi tray
A serving tray from a Brazilian hardwood staircase off-cut that a neighbour threw away. Exceptionally dense and hard, with an extraordinary flowing grain that a staircase builder could not have cared less about.