Writing
10 essays, newest first
2026
The Case for Business Analysts
Engineers love solving problems. The hard part is knowing which problem you were actually asked to solve. On Derrida, DynamoDB, a meeting that changed my mind, and the people who keep the ink from smudging.
I Am Going Into Debt and Here Is Why You Should Join Me
Tech debt gets a bad name, but financial debt can be strategic. On how to borrow from the world of finance, the DynamoDB lesson that changed how I build, and why impulsive debt is just debt that nobody wrote down.
My Language Is Dying
Code was once a language I spoke with a voice distinctly my own. LLMs have made me faster, but they have also made me quieter. On what we lose when the code review is replaced by a markdown file, and a model that has never met you.
Scenes from Home Affairs
A witness account from a Home Affairs office in Cape Town. On the power of language, the dehumanization that follows, and what we reveal about ourselves through how we treat those on the margins of society.
What Got Us Here, Won't Get Us There
Evolution rewards adaptation. But the traits that helped us survive one environment can work against us when the world changes. On competition, maladaptation, and learning to repurpose the claws that got you here.
Something to Hold On To
On burnout, the systems we build to survive it, and why having something to hold on to — hiking, exercise, journaling — matters more than working harder.
The Spectrum vs The Medium
On living with Asperger's Syndrome and navigating a world built on ambiguous language, implied meaning, and unspoken social contracts — and the ongoing work of building a more anti-fragile framework for understanding it.
The Case for Humanity: What Chess Got Right About AI
From Kasparov vs Deep Blue to AI agents today — why the amateur chess players who beat the grandmasters give us the best model for humanity's role in an AI-powered world.
The Review Bottleneck: Why Software Engineering Isn't Ready for the AI Era
From dragging Scratch blocks to auditing AI-generated Pull Requests. A reflection on how AI has eliminated the writing bottleneck in software development, only to create a massive review gap that the profession isn't prepared for.
I Built an Adaptive RAG Chatbot and It Works on My Machine
A journey through retrieval-augmented generation, multilingual AI, and the art of context engineering. Learn how I built an adaptive RAG system that bridges Shona and English using 130K+ Wikipedia passages, FAISS vector search, and modern LLMs.