Engineering notes
Short engineering essays about building at the seam of software and machines: design decisions, failure modes, and patterns I reuse. Each one either comes with something you can run or is a write-up of something I actually fixed. No trend pieces, no founder reflections, and no stack comparisons without measurements. If a note doesn’t meet that bar, I don’t publish it.
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Industrial, Trust
You can’t see a refactor. So try to break the machine.
You paid for a refactor and nothing looks different: same paths, same screens. My answer is not to review the code, but to take a break-it checklist to the machine. If you can’t make it fail unsafely, you’ve seen what you paid for.
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How I Work
One email per milestone
You want “an HMI”, and that’s the whole spec. I split the work into milestones so it can’t spiral, and run each one with a single email. From your side, one big risk becomes a series of small stages you can watch being completed.
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How I Work
Why I lead with a runnable demo
A quote is cheap and a claim is easy. Giving you something that runs on mock data, before you hand over any credential, moves the risk from you to me.
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Safety-Critical, Motion Control
Industrial reliability: change the denominator
You can’t count the bugs that will hurt you, because they’re the ones you couldn’t imagine. So stop counting bugs and count consequence classes instead. How to keep a machine safe when you already know your software has bugs you haven’t found.