Essays on building, and on everything else.

Why AI should grow wiser

LLMs lowered the walls between ideas and their making. The harder question is what all that capability is for.

The story behind Maiaen

Fifteen years of separate threads, a music composer, a language for testers, a year of philosophy, that turned out to be one idea.

Start small, stay narrow

Five simple rules, and the habit of breaking all of them.

LLMs: a discovery more than an invention

Not good architecturally, but viable economically. On using LLMs while building towards systems that need them less.

The agent memory problem: notes from building one

When the bottleneck moves: notes on consulting after LLMs

Explore then scale: an engineering discipline for AI-native companies

The story behind these pages

From engineer to architect: what AI changed

Habit beats goals: the pedometer principle

MusCom, the failure I keep coming back to

A final-year project that failed in almost every way, and the music composer it is still trying to become.

Design your DSL for the layperson, not the expert

Domain-driven design for creative computing

Formal languages are the bridge between programming and intelligence

MVP paralysis when the domain is too broad

Deadlines as complexity control

Start with objectives, not with grammars

A life around curiosity

Maps, made-up planets, crude poetry, then programming. The harder part was building a life around the curiosity.

Inspiration needs attention

The IT job’s moderation tax

Intelligence is relative to its world

Intelligence is the ability to form, update and use concepts, and every one of those is bounded by the system doing it.

Worlds, models and minds that evolve

A system with a fixed model is a world. A system whose model evolves is a mind. The difference is where intelligence lives.

Software that thinks with you

From commands to conversation: why development should be interactive, and what makes an application intelligent at all.

The Indian IT bubble that never burst

Art and craft

Art asks you to forget the rules. Craft asks you to keep them. Most institutions teach only one.

A workshop for stories

What a story is, why one thought can take many mediums, and why it needs a place to be made.

Testing and building for the Internet of Things · Part 1

Why IoT is hard to test

Scale, variety and the internet itself make the usual QA process fall apart. What to do instead.

Testing and building for the Internet of Things · Part 2

An end-to-end test harness

Simulated devices, a broker in the middle, and a framework that checks every hop: how to automate an IoT system’s tests.

Testing and building for the Internet of Things · Part 3

Edge AI in the physical world

An attendance system that combines a sensor, a Raspberry Pi and face recognition, and what its architecture teaches.

Designing a Netconf Manager · Part 1

The shape of the problem

What a Netconf manager has to do, written as one small equation, and why it splits into a library and a service.

Designing a Netconf Manager · Part 2

The library

Four layers in the RFC become four components: operations, session, RPC and transport, with the session at the centre.

Designing a Netconf Manager · Part 3

The service

Growing the design one use case at a time: from one client and one node to many clients and many nodes.

Designing a Netconf Manager · Part 4

Subscriptions and notifications

Why a good architecture absorbs RFC 5277 with almost no change, and the one place it should bend.