~/philosophy

Philosophy

Engineering is about tradeoffs. I came to it through economics, and the habit that stuck is thinking in opportunity cost, not just cost—every system you build is also every system you now can't build, and every clever abstraction is paid for out of someone's future attention.

The most difficult engineering problem is making things less complex. Building something clever is the default. The hard part is fighting entropy and reducing costs—in time, tokens, or dollars.

The systems I'm proudest of are the ones nobody notices: simpler, cheaper, harder to break. Reliability work is, at bottom, a promise not to hurt the people depending on you. Medicine got there first: primum non nocere.