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The Sovereignty That Wasn't

The Sovereignty That Wasn't

European healthcare organizations chose Zivver—a Dutch email security provider—precisely because it kept patient data under EU jurisdiction. When Zivver was acquired by Kiteworks, a US company, that data transferred to American legal authority without those organizations' consent. The sovereignty they thought they'd purchased turned out

The Tools That Travel

The Tools That Travel

The best tools are the ones that still work when you need them again. Simon Willison has built over 150 HTML tools—single-file applications combining HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Each one solves a specific problem: converting JSON to YAML, cropping images for social media, extracting text from PDFs, displaying Bluesky

The Architectural Pendulum

The Architectural Pendulum

Twilio is abandoning microservices and returning to a monolith. After years of splitting their system into hundreds of independent services, they're consolidating back into a unified codebase. The reason: microservices solved one pain and created another. This isn't a tech story. It's a pattern

The Drift We Don't Notice

The Drift We Don't Notice

Diane Vaughan studied the Challenger disaster for years before naming what she found: the normalization of deviance. NASA engineers didn't wake up one morning and decide O-rings failing in cold weather was acceptable. The standard eroded gradually. Each launch that didn't end in catastrophe became evidence

Blessing the Whole Mess

Blessing the Whole Mess

Armor vs. extension. Contraction vs. blessing.

The Decade Horizon Problem

The Decade Horizon Problem

Timeline misalignment. Infrastructure operates on 20-50 year cycles; political terms on 4 years; quarterly reviews on 90 days. Each layer optimizes for its own horizon. Rational actors produce irrational outcomes because the accountability frame doesn't match the infrastructure frame.

Blessing the Whole Mess

Blessing the Whole Mess

When the world breaks into pieces, one response is to bless it anyway—not as denial, but as defiance. A poem that works as spell.