Friday night moan ….. Fashion driven IT
A Friday Coffee reflection on fashion-driven IT, technology hype, and the need for more scepticism in architecture decisions.
Series
Friday Coffee
Lighter personal writing on technology, work, memory, and change.
Not everything worth thinking about fits neatly into an architecture diagram.
Friday Coffee is where I step back from the technical posts and write about technology as I actually experience it — the rate of change, the tools that have quietly transformed how I work, the memories that help me make sense of where we’ve ended up.
I’ve been in IT since 1985. That’s long enough to have lived through mainframes, minis, PCs, client-server, browsers, and microservices. But something about this moment feels different, and these posts are my attempt to think out loud about what that means.
No conclusions guaranteed. Grab a coffee.
How do you keep up with AI?
A personal reflection on keeping up with fast-moving AI tools without confusing constant novelty with durable understanding.
At 61, AI Gave Me a Second Act
A personal reflection on how AI agents have made ambitious software work feel possible again after decades in technology.
The antenna, the inter-library loans and infinite patience
A Friday Coffee reflection on building a VHF antenna, old technical books, patient learning, and the pleasures of finding things out slowly.
AI Coding Tools Are Not the End of Craft
AI coding tools change the economics of software work, but they make judgement, craft, testing and responsibility more important rather than less.
The Billion-Dollar One-Person Business
AI makes one skilled person extraordinarily productive. But a business needs more kinds of judgement than any one person holds, and that is the constraint the hype quietly ignores.
Where Do the Next Seniors Come From?
AI can do the beginner work. That is exactly the problem, because the beginner work is how beginners became experts. Construction already ran this experiment, and the bill arrived decades later.
The Bridge Looked Fine Too
A wonky shelf looks wonky. But the most celebrated engineers have built magnificent structures with fatal flaws nobody could see. Software has always had that problem, and unsupervised AI takes it somewhere genuinely unknown.
The Borrowed Projector
My father already knew his trade in his hands. Becoming a lecturer meant serving a second apprenticeship on top of it — and what he taught me in a darkened living room was never really about roof trusses.
A Tale of a Rubik's Cube, Mahler's Ninth, and a Misbehaving Data Warehouse
A Rubik's Cube, Mahler's Ninth and a slow data warehouse all point to the same skill: building internal models that connect representation, reality and judgement.