Archive
All writing
Every article, in one place — 15 so far.
Most read
- 1What Debugging Taught Me About Listening
- 2What Systems Thinking Taught Me About Watching Kenyan Politics
- 3Building From Here, Not Around Here
- 4The Unsexy Middle of Building Something
- 5Meaning in an Optimized Age
What Systems Thinking Taught Me About Watching Kenyan Politics
I'm not a political commentator, and this isn't an endorsement of anyone or anything specific — just an honest reflection on the patterns I keep noticing, as someone who spends his professional life thinking about systems.
Building From Here, Not Around Here
On the specific, unglamorous realities of building software in Kenya, and why I stopped thinking of them purely as obstacles to route around.
Why Good Systems Fail Good People
A software architect's perspective on why well-intentioned institutions so often produce outcomes nobody inside them actually wanted.
Meaning in an Optimized Age
A reflection on what gets lost when almost every part of modern life is designed to be measured, and what I've tried to hold onto instead.
What Debugging Taught Me About Listening
The single most useful skill I've picked up from a career spent fixing broken systems turned out to transfer almost perfectly to fixing broken conversations.
The Unsexy Middle of Building Something
Nobody warns you about the middle — after the exciting start and before anything is proven. Here is what that stretch actually feels like.
Discipline Is a System, Not a Feeling
What years of building software systems taught me about building better personal habits.
The Quiet Redesign of How We Belong
Notes on watching community shift shape in a city where everyone is online, mobile, and slightly more alone than the generation before.
Why We Do the Things We Know Are Bad for Us
A systems thinker's attempt to understand procrastination, self-sabotage, and the gap between what we know and what we do.
The Discipline of Rest
I'm not a clinician — just someone who burned out once and had to relearn what rest actually means. This is what I've noticed, for whatever it's worth.
Leadership Is Mostly Absorbing Uncertainty
What years of advising engineering teams taught me about what leadership actually looks like day to day, as opposed to how it gets described in books.
What We Lose When We Optimize Everything
A systems architect on the cost of treating every part of life like a performance metric.