Ideas & initiatives
Half-thoughts, in public.
Reverse chronological. Each one has a permalink. Some grow into Lab posts; most don’t. The bar to publish is deliberately low — this is the page where I think out loud.
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Government IT contractors hold the most domain knowledge and the least job security. The asymmetry is worth thinking about.
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AI didn’t replace my coding — it surfaced what was actually valuable: the domain knowledge no model has been trained on.
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Most “modernization” in government IT is UI work pretending to be transformation. The hard part is the workflow nobody documented.
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FILESTREAM looks elegant until your DB grows past a few hundred GB. Then you wish you’d put files on SFTP from day one. Long version over here.
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The slowest function in any government workflow is almost never code. It is whoever has to physically look at a piece of paper before the next state transition can fire. Designing for that constraint is the work.
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A useful exercise: take any “simple” jQuery upgrade ticket and try to write down, before you start, every place it could break. Then start. The gap between the list and the reality is the entire job.
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Started this stream. The point of having both a Lab and an Ideas page is to lower the activation energy for writing — not everything I want to publish wants to be a 2,000-word post.