About

I write about how engineering organizations actually behave, and about what large language models do once you put them into production instead of demos.

The essays lean on systems laws: Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, Amdahl's Law, Goodhart's Law, and the Theory of Constraints. Those laws were written for machines and queues, and they describe org charts just as well. They explain failures that usually get blamed on people. A team adds three engineers and ships less. Every metric improves and the date does not move. The work sits at 90 percent done for six weeks running.

Twenty-six years in technology, fifteen of them leading engineering teams. Today I manage a team building AI-powered security applications at scale. Before that, cloud billing infrastructure, game commerce, real-time sports betting, and ML-based network traffic analysis. I started in the late nineties writing Perl against medical records systems.

MS in Analytics from Georgia Tech, AI and ML concentration. GIAC Certified Machine Learning Engineer.

Fettink is the archive. The same articles go out on Medium and LinkedIn, where more people find them, and the durable copy stays here. Visual journeys are coming, longer pieces built for scrolling.