JTF Alpha is chapter 11 of the serialized sci-fi novel I’m working on — the Masters. Here, we get to see the hand-selected men of John Spillers as they prepare to do a combat jump into the Grass Cutting Area compound inside Ramey Air base on the western tip of Puerto Rico.

Part 3 of The Masters—we peek into the interrogation facility at Ramey Air Force Base, and learn about two of its occupants: a 460 year old ceiba tree and Captain Cristian Monserrate Sepulveda. This project is hosted on Substack.

I lived in Chicago for 14 years, and during that time, before going into tech, worked as a grocery bagger, a cashier, a caddy, a lifeguard, an elevator operator, a landscaper, a knife salesman, an adult literacy advocate, a portrait framer, a shirt steamer, a forklift driver, and an usher at Soldier Field. Eleven of those years were spent working in the restaurant business—as a line cook, dishwasher, busboy, waiter, barback, bartender, and shithouse sommelier. I learned how to size people up based on their accents, cuff links, shoes, conversation topics, and the kind and quality of bullshit coming out of their mouths. The time I spent in Chicago, working these weird jobs makes me (I think) a crackerjack spotter of a whole range of put-ons, bullshit, ass-puffery, and weasel wording.

A sample of the first chapter of “The Masters”—a story I’m writing, and now roughly 20,000 words into. For the whole ball of wax, check out: https://roughmasters.substack.com.

Memories of growing up in the south as a low krass immigrant (neither black nor white) attending a berry berry high krass school.

A chat with my dad about robots, pool, and free will – 1982, right after seeing Bladerunner at the Walnut Mall theater in Petersburg Virginia.

I’ll be leaving Shotgun Software (eg: Autodesk) at the end of October. This is a farewell to current and former Shotgunners. I wanted my teammates to hear my voice and see my face – not just read my words.

In 1993, everyone seemed to know of a pool cleaner who could also build a web site. That’s no longer the case. Now, there are too many sub-disciplines within software engineering for a single person to know how to design, build, test, and deploy a secure application from scratch. Most software engineers know this, but some are convinced they know more than they do – a completely normal phoneomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth.

Inferred competence is the act of correlating performance of a highly complex range of tasks from a single performance of one (or a few) tasks. When Anthony Bourdain wanted to hire a cook, he’d invite the candidate into his kitchen, and issue a single command: Make me an omelette. A thoughtful CI pipeline tries to duplicate that same simplicity.

Several years ago, I posted video instructions on how to open a lockbox. It was intended for an airbnb guest traveling to New York from Europe. That video recently surpassed 100,000 views. The comments are hilarious.

There are kinds of celebrity. My 14 year old daughters have a pretty solid way of deconstructing it, and explained it to me at the beach this past Labor Day weekend. Here it is.

AI-based card scanner app that lets you upload an image and view the result. Uses AWS textract and rekognition to determine if your file is a valid US covid vaccination card… or a picture of a cat. 😂

Contrary to the absurd belief that republicans are rugged individualists, born in log cabins they built with their own bare hands red states like Texas frequently receive WAY MORE from the federal government than they give. Put another way, red states, on average, enjoy the redistributed wealth produced in places exactly like New York and New Jersey. This blog post lays it out in a series of charts.

Dad strength is the kind of physical strength that’s useful when stuff goes wrong and people are depending on you — in clutch situations. Every dad ought to meet or exceed his own minimal definition of strong, but I think these strength benchmarks are generally applicable because they scale to any weight.

Things have normalized enough in New York City for me to go right back to worrying about dumb stuff.

Do the people at your company have integrity? The answer had better be a f*** yeah. Here’s my ranked list of items more important than salary, bonus, stock options, etc.