Now

Where I am

Petersburg, Alaska — and staying. For the last few years the boat has run north through the Inside Passage for the summer and back down to Washington before the weather turned. This winter it doesn’t. I’m wintering over in southeast Alaska instead.

What I’m working on

At Clerk, anti-fraud and the LLM work — the two have more in common than they look like they do, since both are ultimately about deciding how much to trust something you cannot fully verify.

Alongside that, a few things in the open. laredo is a Go library and service for real-time PostgreSQL data sync — general infrastructure that fell out of product work and got pulled out behind a clean boundary rather than left to rot in a private repo. ZFN-46 is the argument for doing it that way.

lplex came from the opposite direction: I wanted the boat’s NMEA 2000 bus talking to something a computer could actually work with, so I built it. It’s published under SixFathoms with the rest of the marine work. I also keep eelyos.com going — the boat’s own site.

What I’m thinking about

Fraud and abuse, mostly from the defending side of it.

How LLMs are changing not just the craft of building software but the society around it. The second is the larger story and gets a fraction of the careful thought the first does.

That capitalism doesn’t have to be inherently bad — an unfashionable thing to say in both directions at the moment, which is usually a sign a question is worth sitting with.

That a life lived between two cultures hands you a vantage a lot of people never get: the habit of holding two things true at once instead of collapsing them into whichever is more comfortable. It took me a long time to see that as an advantage rather than as not belonging anywhere.

And, with no attempt to connect it to any of the above: I’m catching halibut and salmon.

What I’m writing

The two long-running collections are the Field Notes — short, numbered positions on how to build software well — and the Blueprints, full implementation specifications written to be handed to a builder, increasingly a coding agent, as a URL. The notes argue; the blueprints specify.

There are essays too, and poetry, which is a different part of the brain and not one I try to make argue for itself.

Say hi

I’m not chasing a job, a client, or an adventure, but I’m open to all of it. If you want to talk about what you’re building or thinking about, schedule a call. Winter in Petersburg means I am, if anything, easier to reach than usual.

This is a now page. If it is badly out of date, that is worth knowing about it too.