Field notes, technical dispatches, and occasional philosophy.
If You Can't Win, Lead
My kids are digitally native. So I'm building them a Pelican-style spy-quest toolbox that boots into exactly one app — ciphers, bearings, dead drops, and a cartoon that finally plays when the mission is done.
The Room Turns to You
Kedr — a meeting companion that listens for the questions that are yours to answer and hands you the answer from your own knowledge, privately, before you have to ask twice. In active development, invite-only.
I Don't Get to Say 'It's Just Magic'
One of my kids, eight years old, asked why things get smaller when they walk away. Nineteen interactive, physically accurate relativity drills later — starring Liza, Vika, and George — here's what came of refusing to hand-wave.
Invention Was Never Supposed to Be a Brainstorm
dttriz is live — a Guide that docks Design Thinking with TRIZ, the two innovation frameworks from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, into one mechanism. The Soyuz-Apollo of Innovation, operationalized.
You Can't Optimize What You Don't Understand How to Wreck
The SQL Server Internals interactive drills are live — on-disk structures, I/O mechanics, optimizer behavior, execution plans.
Back in the Trenches, Part 2: Make It Talk
Building the full pipeline — from Twilio call ingestion to LLM causal reasoning — to extract why a changepoint happened, not just when.
Back in the Trenches, Part 1: Karaul!
On returning to hands-on engineering — building a TypeScript changepoint detection library from first principles while running a technology organization.
Zen and the Art of Making Samogon: A Survival Guide for the AI Era
On Pirsig, a moonshine still built from copper tubing in Nigerian heat, and why the willingness to look inside things matters more now than ever.
The Soyuz-Apollo of Innovation, Part 2: Thinking Outside the Bottle
Baker Street, Moscow. Winter. Whiskey. A real business problem, a real solution using TRIZ and Design Thinking, and a real patent buried in impenetrable legal language.
The Soyuz-Apollo of Innovation, Part 1: Dark Soviet TRIZ, Sunny Californian Design Thinking, and One Toilet Seat Cover
Two innovation frameworks invented on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain — and how to combine them into an actual mechanism for solving problems that shouldn't have solutions.
A Man Without a Built-In LLM
Reading Susan Schaller's account of Ildefonso — a man who reached 27 without ever learning a language — and what it reveals about cognition, AI, and the internal monologue we take for granted.
From Siberian Cold to Brazilian Beaches — The One Rule That Kept Me in the Game
Performance without purpose is just a well-organized path to burnout. On the one rule that has survived two decades across four countries.
My Second Brain So I Don't Lose My First One
How I built an aggressively automated knowledge system — Microsoft Graph API, Jira, Asana, and an LLM — to survive the information hellscape of running a regional technology organization.
A SQL Query That Made Me Question All My Career Choices
War stories from twenty years of SQL Server — the bugs that crashed production at 3 AM, why vibe-coding makes it worse, and the lessons that leave permanent battle scars.
When Bureaucracy Meets Gambiarra: The Russian-Brazilian Way of Problem-Solving
How I built e-Boris — an Azure + GPT-4 email triage system named after a movie villain — to solve a process problem that defeated three engineers, a PM, and a consultant.
Giving Away a Startup Idea — EnergyFlow, The Calendar App That Actually Cares About Your Sanity
A free startup idea: a calendar that optimizes for mental energy, not empty time slots. Deep AI participant profiling, dynamic scoring, and one lifetime license in return.