Behind the Book: The Day Your Website Died
A client told me he had asked Perplexity for a ghostwriter and my name came back. Then it happened again with a different engine. That is why this book exists.
Category: Technology
Coverage of technology developments, tools, and trends relevant to writers and professionals. Examines how technology shapes work, communication, and daily life, with perspective from 20 years in IT leadership.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Death of Thinking
A specific kind of softness had developed in my own work and in the work of writers and programmers I know. Not laziness. Not incompetence. A softness in the instrument itself.
TechnologyWe Lifted a Running Computer Off the Floor
A hard constraint will hand you a solution you would never have picked from a list of options, and the solution is often better than what you would have chosen freely. We had a floor tile buckling under a live…
TechnologyThey Found It in Three Hours and Sent No Invoice
When a vendor has been working on your problem for a week without a theory, that is your signal to bring in somebody else. One firm spent a week on a slowdown that had stopped our business. A second firm…
TechnologyWe Built a Disaster Recovery Site Without a Budget
A tested system and a proven system are different things, and most companies say covered when they mean tested. I built a disaster recovery site over several years with no budget and no headcount, tested it regularly, and never once…
TechnologyNobody Applied
If you cannot fill a technical role, the problem may not be your pay or your posting. I went looking for database administrators in the United States and nobody applied, which surprised me at the time.
TechnologyEvery Call Came to Me Because No Rule Existed
If you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability. The escalation logic lives in your head and nowhere else, so every call has to reach you. Writing that logic down on…
TechnologyThey Hated the Rotation Until They Could Put the Phone Down
The valuable half of an on-call schedule is the part where you are not on it, and that half only exists if the boundary is real.
TechnologyNobody Chooses to Modernize
Modernization gets sold as an opportunity and it almost never arrives as one. It arrives as a bill, when a vendor stops supporting something or a platform can no longer be upgraded.
TechnologyWe Bought the Platform and Shipped the Workaround
Every platform purchase has a gap between signing and working, and nobody plans for what happens inside it. We bought enterprise middleware during a major migration, and while it was being implemented one of my programmers and his team wrote…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Birth of the Augmented Human
The Death of Thinking is the diagnosis and this is the answer, following the same twelve people down the path they did not take. The practices are small, they compound, and they are what I do.
TechnologyWe Did Not Fix the System, We Moved It
Before you fund a project to modernize an aging system, find out whether the failures are coming from the software or from the hardware underneath it. We had an old system breaking constantly and running slow. Nobody rewrote a line…