Joshua McDonaldAug 26, 2026Everything Says Urgent, So Stop Sorting on ArrivalThe research on why the loud task wins, the prompt that scores importance without seeing the urgency markers, and what to do about the…
Joshua McDonaldAug 25, 2026A Third of Feedback Makes Performance WorseKluger and DeNisi found feedback backfiring in 38 percent of cases. The failures have two things in common: no specific action and distance…
Joshua McDonaldAug 18, 2026Only Variety Can Absorb VarietyAshby’s law, the arithmetic of control, and why the manager is now the constraint
Joshua McDonaldAug 11, 2026Being Wrong in PublicNewton, Popper, the AWS Correction of Errors process, and how mistakes made in the open become the shoulders others stand on
Joshua McDonaldJul 23, 2026Amdahl’s Law for Org ChartsWhat a three-page paper from 1967 explains about two-pizza teams, monoliths, and why your calendar time refuses to shrink
Joshua McDonaldJul 2, 2026Who Reviews the Reasoning?The code coming out of agents runs, and the reviewers shipping today catch the bugs. Nobody is reviewing the decision: was this the right…
Joshua McDonaldJun 9, 2026Why system design matters more as AI makes building fasterWhat AI still can’t reason about no matter how well you prompt it.
Joshua McDonaldJun 4, 2026robots.txt Told Crawlers Where to Stop. llms.txt Tells Agents Where to GoWhat the file does, how to write one, and why retrieval is the part that actually matters.
Joshua McDonaldApr 7, 2026When You Can Build Anything, How Do You Decide What to Build?Every engineering team eventually faces this question, and fifty years of business theory offer some guidance on how to answer it.
Joshua McDonaldMar 19, 2026Purpose Is EverythingHow to Set a North Star and Then Actually Deliver on It
Joshua McDonaldFeb 26, 2026If Your Career Were a Product, Would Anyone Invest?Most people never use 1:1 meetings, running documentation, and a skills matrix until it’s too late.
Joshua McDonaldFeb 23, 2026Why Every Engineering Team Needs a Monthly Business ReviewImagine it’s the end of the quarter. Leadership is preparing the board deck, and someone asks, “What did engineering actually ship this…
Joshua McDonaldFeb 16, 2026The Efficiency Illusion: Why Your AI Strategy is Accelerating Inefficiency, and How to Pivot to…Stop making your inefficiencies faster. Automating a broken workflow doesn’t create value; it just accumulates technical debt at machine…
Joshua McDonaldFeb 5, 2026Build Your Own AI General Contractor: A Practical Simulation Implementing Deterministic Guardrails…In my previous article, I explained why the time of the “Handyman AI”, one model trying to do everything, is over. I suggested that…
Joshua McDonaldNov 20, 2025What a trip to the supermarket can teach you about writing security tickets that engineers actually…This is a story about connecting threads and combining ideas from different experiences, as much as it is about engineering, security, or…
Joshua McDonaldApr 25, 2021Three things to avoid and three things to do to foster open communication in teamsPerhaps the most important thing you can learn to be both a more effective team member and leader is to learn the art of asking questions…
Joshua McDonaldApr 19, 2021On testing softwareI’ve taught some college courses and have always been asked to provide a teaching philosophy as a guide to both students, but also the…
Joshua McDonaldJun 25, 2020What matters now?How to use Objectives and Key Results to narrow your focus on what matters and overcome your fear of failure.
