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The Long View

On Technology, People and the Passing of Time

Eight essays on fifty years at the frontier of technology. On what the work actually felt like, what was lost, what was learned, and what the long view reveals that the annual review never captures.

8 essays ~50 min total reading 2027

About this series

These essays sit alongside the professional writing on this site but occupy different territory. They are personal rather than instructional — not frameworks or methodologies but observations, accumulated over a long career, about what the work is actually like from the inside. They are written for anyone who has spent serious time in enterprise technology and occasionally wondered whether their experience of it is shared.

01
Where Have All The Good Times Gone
There was a period in my career when arriving at work on a Monday felt like arriving at a frontier. On what was lost — and why it probably had to be.
June 20278 min
 02
Nobody Actually Reads the Architecture Document
Approved, version-controlled, endorsed at the ARB — and quietly ignored while the actual architecture took shape through a thousand daily decisions.
June 20276 min
 03
The Six Words That Kill Every Good Technology Project
Not incompetence. Not underfunding. Not poor architecture. Four words, deployed quietly in the right meeting, at the right moment.
June 20275 min
 04
On Being Wrong
Intellectual honesty requires accounting for the predictions you made with confidence that turned out to be completely wrong. Here, for the record, is a selection.
July 20277 min
 05
Why the Best Technical People Leave
It almost never comes down to the money — not at root. The actual reason is almost always one of four things, each with a common characteristic.
July 20277 min
 06
The Consultant Who Stayed Too Long
Every engagement has a natural endpoint. Recognising it, and acting on it rather than constructing reasons to extend, is one of the harder disciplines of consulting work.
July 20276 min
 07
Fifty Years of Watching the Same Ideas Come Back Around
Thin clients became Chromebooks. SOA became microservices. The data warehouse became the data mesh. After fifty years, the pattern is unmistakable.
August 20277 min
 08
The Saturday Morning Problem
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from overwork but from the feeling that the work has stopped mattering. On noticing it before it compounds.
August 20276 min