Essays on engineering leadership, regulated systems, and AI accountability.
For fifty years, engineers built the world on a promise: same input, same output, always. It was never entirely true, and where it was true it proved less than we thought. The tools we're shipping now won't let us pretend either way.
A century-old idea won a court case, lost the argument for fifty years, and only became the rulebook in the 1970s. This is how shareholder primacy went from contested to obvious, and why it is being contested again.
We've been shipping non-deterministic code for decades. We learned to live with it. Now we're scaling that chaos to production systems we can't understand, and hoping observability saves us.
stealmybitcoin.com dangles a Bitcoin key behind a /print-flag binary and a PHP user. I threw the whole nginx and PHP CVE catalog at it and got the same bytes back every time. A clean scan is a floor, not a verdict, and the real way in was somewhere I never looked…
A coding agent took one calm line from my global config and cranked it into a BLOOD OATH. Nothing attacked it. The model turned its own volume up…
It grinds my gears every time I get an AI slop response. When I ask you something, I'm not after a general answer. I'm after yours…
Survival is not elegance. It is adaptation under pressure Nature has been running the longest continuous experimentation process in history…
Open source code on GitHub: https://github.com/ballance/transcription In my work with transcription systems, one challenge comes up repeate…
There was a time when the only way to use a computer was to wait your turn. In the early days of computing, machines were so large, so expe…
“I used to think the em dash was a red flag. Not in a literary sense, but in a “your robot forgot to sound like you” kind of way. If someone…”
On any given evening, Katherine Ballance cracks open the dense PMBOK tome and attacks it with a rainbow of highlighters. She has color-code…
Over the years I have gone from a C++ in the early days building mathematical models for industrial processes to C#, Java, Python, briefly…
Culture isn’t a memo. Every small decision: who you hire, how you handle mistakes, and even what tools you approve, shapes your team. Here’…
I inherited from my father a strong tendency to over-engineer everything I build. Generally, it's a good trait, but it comes with certain t…
Originally published at https://chrisballance.com/2017/03/28/abstract-guilds-of-craftsmen/ While driving back from lunch with a friend the…
Having a written policy keeps any decisions out of the hands of arbitrary choice. Years of working in IT, especially in the financial and m…
Once upon a time, in an economy far far away, the measure of a company was its balance sheet alone. While a company must be profitable in o…
Twenty-four years might be considered a long time for a mentor-ship, but this one was unique, and started way back in 1981. What I didn’t k…
I recently decided to set out on the somewhat mundane task of replacing my (nearly falling over) mailbox with a nicer brick one. It's certa…
Whether you’re asked about the circumference of the Earth, the number of cups in a gallon, or the land speed velocity of an unladen Swallow…
As a student of both my Dad, and Sun Tzu, the following advice has proven useful to me over the years. "The best victory is when the oppone…
This morning, my wife asked me to fix the printer so that she could print some forms. Sure, I could have spent a few minutes fighting with…