Living Notes
These are working notes that evolve as projects surface new constraints and better approaches.
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Books and Notes
Books that are shaping how I think: about systems, work, technology, and the bigger questions underneath all of it.
Currently Reading
More Everything Forever
Notes: A pointed look at effective altruism and longtermism: the belief that everything is broken enough to justify radical means in pursuit of a distant utopia, including getting humanity off this planet entirely. The ends-justify-the-means logic gets examined pretty carefully.
Takeaways (so far): The critique of how urgency and perceived existential stakes can be used to bypass normal ethical guardrails is sharp and worth sitting with. The futurism predictions are interesting but still an open question.
Still forming. Notes will be updated when finished.
Nearly Finished
The Friction Project
Notes: Reducing drag requires seeing the full operating system around the work, not just the immediate task.
Takeaways: Listen to the five voices: customer, employee, owner, community, and process. Better systems come from balancing all five in decisions.
How it shows up in projects: Incident and workflow reviews include user impact, operator burden, business tradeoffs, ecosystem effects, and process clarity before changes are finalized.
In Progress, Returned
The Pragmatic Programmer
Notes: The strongest theme is decoupling and building systems that are easier to change over time.
Takeaways: Prefer adaptable structures, loose coupling, and incremental improvement in software, workflows, and documentation rather than brittle one-off solutions.
How it shows up in projects: Validation workflows, runbooks, and tooling are written so teams can evolve them safely as environments change.
Finished
The Phoenix Project
Notes: Flow, constraints, unplanned work, and reliability tradeoffs are central to operational health.
Takeaways: Protect bottlenecks, reduce avoidable WIP, and make operational work visible so recovery and planning improve over time.
How it shows up in projects: Runbooks and checklists are structured to reduce cognitive load during incidents and keep handoffs aligned across teams.