the physics of delivery

I used to celebrate by pushing my physical limits at a pub; this year, I celebrated by pushing my cognitive limits in a terminal. A few years ago, I would have spent tonight at a rooftop lounge somewhere in Kolkata. Loud music, too many people, lots of drinks and food, and the kind of high-octane celebration where you get intoxicated far beyond reasonable limits. Birthdays meant midnight parties, groups, and groups meant noise, and noise meant you didn’t have to sit with your

Or: How I Spent a Decade Teaching 200 Engineers to Never Do What I Did on My Birthday There is a particular species of hypocrisy that only operations leaders can achieve. It requires years of training. You must first spend a decade reviewing other people's code, shaking your head slowly at pull requests, and delivering sermons on modularity, security, and “doing it right the first time.” You must build a reputation. Your team of 200 must associate your teams handle with phras

Seeing Structure, Sitting Alone When new projects came in with messy requirements, vague ambitions, half-formed ideas - my mind would automatically start pulling them apart. Not aggressively, not to simplify them away, but to understand what actually  needed to exist for the thing to work. I never named this process. I never formalised it. It wasn’t something I learned from a book or a framework. It was just how I learned to survive delivery. Only much later did I realise tha