Planning With Agents: Better can be Better

Annotations on Maggie Appleton's 2026 talk about Boundary Objects

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Tell the speakers that you liked their talks

Some quick thoughts on Ana Rodrigues's post "Tell the speakers that you liked their talks", and a general initial test for web-based annotations.

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Union types (C# reference)

Some quick notes on the Union type addition in C# 15, and how I can use it to make Flowthru fail-fast(er)

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Writing Better Gherkin

A few notes on a very important, but hidden, part of the Cucumber and Gherkin documentation around Behavior Driven Development

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The Wild Web

Come with me and explore an invisible social network: IndieWeb, where the cowboy can-do attitude of Web 1.0 is alive and a-thrivin'.

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You can pry my dashes from my cold, dead hands

A bit of self-reflection on dashes in my writing to decide if LLMs have rotted my brain, or if my brain was already beyond saving from the start.

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On Dead Math and Small Pickles

To understand why OpenAI completely upended the world of mathematics with its proof that Navier-Stokes is not smooth in three dimensions, you must first understand that cucumbers of any size can be properly pickled.

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The Season of Stamps

The kickoff post for my Season of Stamps: exploring new places, meeting new people, and putting the final stamp of approval on a back catalog of projects worth publishing.

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Chipotleware

A brief side-rant about the (former) burrito-style economics of junior-level software engineering

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Software Gardening

Garden-inspired development as a non-sinister, people-centric way to think about post-LLM software development

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Security Alert: Softlock and ACE via Natural Language Overload

I think I’ve found a pretty large CVE that has gone without a formal report, despite absolutely saturating the field of software engineering. It’s subtle and…

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Lean Software Development: Prelude Notes

Notes on the prelude chapters of Lean Software Development (2003)

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Working with Valves: Understanding the Structure of "Flat" Organizations

Many an engineer has heard tales of Valve's "flat" organization structure — what is fact, what is fiction, and how does it actually work? An annotated copy of the 2012 First Edition of Valve's Employee Handbook.

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It's All Graphs, Dummy

Our lives are all dominated by a little graph in our hearts — and sometimes, that graph gets wacky. A review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Theory of Stupidity", part of his larger ~1943-1945 work "Letters and Papers from Prison."

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Hyperparameter verification of StcE protein folds in Pedram et al., 2023

The rubber hits the road on ColabFold! I hope that's rubber I'm smelling — although it may be the computer. A replication attempt of a protein fold figure in K. Pedram et al (2023).

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APL: Pattern 4; Agricultural Valleys

Urban development has the high ground over agricultural and ecological preservation — and it should! *A Pattern Language* annotations on Pattern 4: Agricultural Valleys

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APL: Pattern 5; Lace of Country Streets

How dense is too dense? How sparse is too sparse? Annotations for A Pattern Language's proposals for the density of metro-adjacent country streets for agriculture, recreation, and preservation.

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Systems: Week 11 | Spencer Elkington

Watch a human cope about bots taking his job in real time. Is he cooked! Find out tonight in Season of Systems: Week 11!

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An Annotated Guide to Hobbyist Protein Folding | Spencer Elkington

Amaze (or bore) your friends and family by picking up on a hot new hobby that's all the rage — protein folding! An annotated starter to the 2021 paper "ColabFold - Making protein folding accessible to...

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Agentic Programming as Theory Building | Spencer Elkington

Do humans have a role in software development anymore? Absolutely — but we need to rethink what it means to program. An modern review of Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"

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APL: Pattern 3; City Country Fingers | Spencer Elkington

City, with natural stripes — or nature, with city stripes? Annotations for A Pattern Language, and tracking public opinion of where Americans want to live over the past 50 years.

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APL: Pattern 2; The Distribution of Towns | Spencer Elkington

How close is too close? How far is too far? *A Pattern Language* annotations related to the statistical, economic, and ecologic concerns in balancing how dense human habitats ought to be.

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APL: Pattern 1; Independent Regions | Spencer Elkington

Home isn't where the heart is — it's a single node on a very, very large graph. Annotations for the "Independent Regions" pattern of *A Pattern Language*.

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APL: Pattern 0; Introduction | Spencer Elkington

Can graphs be libertarian? Authoritarian? Annotations for the introductory portion of the 1977 book A Pattern Language.

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Systems: Week 7 | Spencer Elkington

Systems: Week 7 — As old as they are, emails still feel like magic Alright — if this system works, I’m going to flip.

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Ants in the Neighborhood | Spencer Elkington

Is Jane Street run by soccer-loving ants? Inconclusive. We *can* conclude that they're fans of Markov Chains, though — an invaluable tool for understanding complex data structures.

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A Pattern Language, and a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

The beginning of a topological review of the 1977 urban design and architecture reference book A Pattern Language, and a journey to understand Earth's greatest graph: the Earth, itself.

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Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow | Spencer Elkington

Annotations for Greiner's 1972 paper "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow", about the structural composition of organizations at different sizes and requirements.

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Quick Fix: Tone Down Obsidian List/Header Padding | Spencer Elkington

Annoyed by Obsidian Live Preview over-padding headers and aggressively indenting? Some snippets to help keep your notes from jumping around, so you can focus on actually writing them.

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The Advantages of Advantage: Intro to Probability Convolutions

What *is* the advantage of rolling with advantage? Exploring dice roll combinations and probability convolutions.

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