Breaking Up With WordPress After Two Decades
Around Black Friday last November, I moved my website from SiteGround to Bluehost. This was not some ambitious infrastructure decision. SiteGround wanted roughly five times more...
#Incentives
Posts on how incentives shape behavior, politics, architecture, and organizational outcomes.
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
Scaling Culture Without Dilution
As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see...
Why Politics Appear
Ancient Athens did not solve uncertainty with better communication. They solved it by removing people. Once a year, citizens gathered to vote on exile. Not for crimes. Not for f...
Why Over-Engineering Happens
If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched...
Prisoner's Dilemma
On September 3, 1949, a weather plane was flying over Japan. It detected traces of radioactive isotopes. These elements decay quickly, which means they had been created recently...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Handling Competitive Dynamics
A healthy level of competition can fuel innovation, drive individuals to excel, and push teams to achieve remarkable results. However, when competition crosses the line and beco...
Why Metrics Don’t Equal Quality
In 1902, Hanoi was drowning in rats. The government was getting nervous about plague. Hence, the city put a bounty per rat tail. Suddenly, the system had a scoreboard, something...