Code, Noted· Modernization · 3 min
Y2K, reconsidered as a success
The disaster that did not happen is remembered as a panic that was wrong. The record says otherwise, and the difference matters for every deadline since.
Software that has to keep standing.
Essays on architecture, modernization and delivery inside large organizations. Long-form, sourced, and unhurried: the systems in question took decades to build, so the essays can take a few weeks.
September 2026
· Practice · 3 min
On the colour of the bikeshed, sixty-nine years on
Parkinson's law of triviality is from 1957; the email that renamed it for software is from 1999. Both are quoted weekly and obeyed nowhere. On attention, consequence, and a budget for reviews.
August 2026
· Leadership · 2 min
The bus factor has a literature
Knowledge concentration can be measured from the repository itself, and researchers have been doing it for a decade. On the number nobody computes until the resignation.
· Delivery · 1 min
On the monthly availability report
GitHub's July report lists eight incidents, and seven of them were changes and expiries rather than code. A note on the institution of publishing your own ledger.
· Architecture · 1 min
Ariane 5, thirty years on
The most expensive integer overflow in history is now three decades old. Its lesson was never about the cast.
· Modernization · 1 min
On finally reading the mainframe
AI made forty-year-old COBOL cheap to read at last. Comprehension and migration remain different problems, and the industry keeps buying one as the other.
· Architecture · 3 min
The formats that outlive us
CSV never got better and never went away; Parquet is a teenager and load-bearing. An essay on file formats as the longest contracts in computing.
· Delivery · 3 min
Ten hours without CI
GitHub Actions failed for ten hours and forty-two minutes on August 6. Read as an instrument, the outage measured every pipeline that runs through it.
