Masters3d - Blog

Right before the pandemic, I was thinking about the time I invested in movies.

In 2020 I was writing queries in Kusto, a loosely typed database language, and noticed something that felt wonderful at first.

During the COVID-19 pandemic I watched more television than usual, and gen:LOCK was exactly the kind of show I had been looking for.

On June 21, 2020, I published Apple Chips == AR Glasses.

Ten years later, the future I hoped for did not arrive for me.

At Ranger camp when I was a kid, we had a phrase we said before a hard hike or a long cold night: be prepared, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Here is the observation that started this: I have not opened a graphical editor to write code since December 2025, when I wrote about my AI tools journey since Opus 4.5.

A long time ago, at one of the companies I worked for, someone in a training session told us that the Relater (the Dove, in the DOPE bird framing of workplace communication) was the worst personality to have.

There was a period when I could drink three or four cappuccinos or mochas before lunch and call the day normal.

Around 2022, before AI was addictive or even useful, I was pulled into a brand new area of a very large project.

Around 2022, before AI was addictive or even useful, I was pulled into a brand new area of a very large project.

I have been dictating long-form thoughts into AI sessions and asking agents to help me turn them into blog posts.

I keep coming back to Swift's actor model, and something small keeps nagging at me.

I spent a while chasing a question that sounds simple: if I write my logic once (say in Rust), how do other languages actually call it?

Some of my best ideas never arrived while I was working on the problem.

More than a decade ago I burned out, and burned out badly.

I have been watching my own pull request queue change shape over the last year.

I was watching a movie about George Washington the other night, and one small moment caught my attention far more than the big battles did.

I have been watching a lot of the World Cup 2026, not all of it (there are far too many games for that), but many of them when time allows.

Swift was the second language I ever learned, right after Python.

In the mapping between Mustafa Suleyman's four capabilities and the Quest Engine, one of them (acquiring your own resources) lands on Search, the move you make before you act.

Looking back across 25 years, the operating systems I have lived on tell a story in three acts: a first five years anchored in Windows, a full decade on macOS and only macOS, and then a return to Windows that is still going strong.

Mustafa Suleyman was asked a direct question: is there anything you could see an AI do where you would say, shut it all down?

Google's SRE practice popularized a phrase that sounds soft until you understand what it demands: the blameless postmortem.

Daniel Kahneman gave us a useful cartoon of the mind: two systems.

When I was starting out as a software engineer, a lot of hesitation held me back from trying things.

For years, my incident vocabulary had one word doing all the heavy lifting: bad.

This whole thing started as a development journal in 2017.

I do not like using the word "impact" in work settings.

I remember reading about the 10,000-hour rule and finding it compelling.

The first time I really tasted salted caramel, I had the thought a beat too late: salt was supposed to ruin this.

When I first lined up the Quest Engine with the three human motivations, I made a tidy mistake.

Hand someone a task and a paycheck, and they will do the work.

Team identity is the first place a team takes ownership.

Tanya Reilly's talk Being Glue is one of those pieces of writing that reorganizes how you see your own week.

I remember when configuration was treated as an afterthought.

I started programming in 2014, but I could have started much earlier.

In Sing 2 (2021), Buster Moon has just been told he's not good enough.

When Tom Brady was inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame in 2024, someone asked him (again) how he got to where he got.

I've started replacing the phrase "context gathering" with "context hunting" in how I talk about this kind of work.

Almost everyone on the planet knows this cue: Lights.

In 1999, the Wachowskis wrote a line that has outlasted most of what surrounded it.

Joseph Campbell spent decades studying myths across every culture he could reach and kept noticing the same shape inside all of them.

"Timing and momentum is more important than talent." — André 3000 This phrase privileges when (Timing) and sustained directional force (Momentum) over raw capability (Talent).

If you strip away religious frameworks, metaphysical claims, and appeals to cosmic significance, what's left?

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." — Archimedes Archimedes wasn't bragging about strength.

I keep hearing "taste, judgment, and craft" on podcasts about exceptional engineers.

In 1968, Stewart Brand started publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (a counterculture toolbox for self-sufficiency, alternative education, and personal empowerment).

The Quest Engine framework describes three recursive action steps: Contextual Awareness (understand before acting), Clear Strategy (execute based on what you know), and Systematic Improvement (make the next cycle better).

The Quest Engine framework is built on three recursive action steps that help you solve problems at any scale.