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 27, 2026Everything Is 90 Percent DoneLittle’s Law, Kingman’s formula, and why the sprint board is full while nothing ships.
Joshua McDonaldJul 16, 2026Ask Your Dashboard What It Reads When Nothing ChangedWork metrics move when you do work. Impact metrics move when the work mattered. AI made the first kind free to move, and most dashboards…
Joshua McDonaldJul 15, 2026You Can’t Compress What You Can’t GradeAdding an eval harness to TokenLens, and why it should have come before the compression work. A follow-up to “I Built a Prompt Compressor…
Joshua McDonaldJul 9, 2026I Built a Prompt Compressor. The Most Useful Thing It Found Was NothingWe’ve always compressed data to save time and money. What’s new isn’t the instinct. It’s that the codec is now a language model. That arc…
Joshua McDonaldJul 7, 2026Let the Expensive Model Write the InstructionsI build dcaudiotours.com, a set of self-guided walking tours for Washington DC. Thirteen themed tours, eight neighborhood walks, each one a…
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 28, 2026Do We Still Need the Sprint?What incremental delivery means, once the cost of an increment falls through the floor, whether the two-week cadence is still earning its…
Joshua McDonaldJun 18, 2026The Preflight Check for Distributed SystemsThe failure modes that take systems down, and where to look for each one
Joshua McDonaldJun 16, 2026What 10²⁶ Actually MeansThe number that defines a “frontier model” in US and California law, in terms of time, hardware, money, and the handful of training runs…
Joshua McDonaldJun 14, 2026How an Export Control Rule Reaches an AI Model Running in a US Data CenterWhat the directive on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 says, how deemed-export law works, and the 1991 precedent. Sourced to primary documents.
Joshua McDonaldJun 11, 2026Claude Skipped Idempotency Because I Never Asked. So I Made Asking Unnecessary.The code broke on a retry I never mentioned, and even when I ask for the fix, the first version is usually the wrong shape. The answer was…
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 McDonaldMay 19, 2026Teaching Probability Through Soccer: Built With Claude CodeA statistics site for middle and high school students, built around the math pro analysts actually use.
Joshua McDonaldMay 14, 2026The Quiet Repricing of AI Coding ToolsCopilot, Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code all moved to usage-based billing inside twelve months. The driver is the same.
Joshua McDonaldMay 12, 2026Coordinating Parallel Engineering Work With ClaudeI have written before about decomposing specs against team shape, and about the specific Claude Code primitives that make the decomposition…
Joshua McDonaldMay 6, 2026Just the Road: Notes on perspective in an industry being rebuilt under our feet.My dad lives in southern Alabama near the ocean and I stay a few miles away near a beautiful community set on a golf course. I go every…
Joshua McDonaldMay 5, 2026The Little Blue Menu and What It Already Knows About AIThere’s a Chick-fil-A in College Park, Maryland, that doesn’t look like a Chick-fil-A. They painted it blue instead of red. The menu…
Joshua McDonaldApr 30, 2026Six Prompts for Reading an Engineering RoadmapWhen you need to come up to speed quickly on a project, a team, or some piece of work, you can have Claude analyze the documents and ask…
Joshua McDonaldApr 23, 2026I Used AI to Audit 7,200 Hospital Price Files. It Found Something the Code Missed.The story of a real data quality bug, how it got caught, and what it means for data engineering.
Joshua McDonaldApr 16, 2026A Spring Break Commute, Five Dollars, and the State of Multilingual Text-to-SpeechMost people’s mental model of AI stops at the chat window. Type a question, get an answer, move on. That framing made sense in 2023 when a…
Joshua McDonaldApr 13, 2026You Don’t Have to Write Code to Need a CLAUDE.mdSetting Up Claude’s Memory for Writers, PMs, Researchers, and Everyone Else
Joshua McDonaldMar 23, 2026Your Team Doesn’t Need Well-Rounded Engineers. It Needs a Well-Rounded Team.Most engineering managers follow a familiar routine during performance reviews. You meet with a team member, recognize some things they do…
Joshua McDonaldMar 19, 2026Purpose Is EverythingHow to Set a North Star and Then Actually Deliver on It
Joshua McDonaldMar 17, 2026I Built a DC Transit Companion with AI on My Commute using my iPhone. Here’s what I learned.I built a DC Metro companion app called “What’s Up Metro DC” in nine days, using only my iPhone during my commute from Shady Grove to…
Joshua McDonaldMar 12, 2026The Best Engineering Leaders I’ve Seen All Have One Thing in Common: They’re Calm When Everything…There’s a moment in every engineer’s career when the pager goes off, and the world feels like it’s ending. The dashboard is a wall of red…
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 11, 2026What a 15th-century lawsuit and a lead letter ‘A’ can teach us about the age of AIThe revolution of the 15th century wasn’t defined by the scent of old paper or libraries. Instead, it was shaped by the strong, industrial…
Joshua McDonaldJan 19, 2026What the Longest Escalator in the Western Hemisphere Teaches Us About AIIf you live in the DC area, you know about the Wheaton Metro station. It’s home to the longest single-span escalator in the Western…
Joshua McDonaldJan 18, 2026Why Your AI Sounds Like a Corporate HR Department (And How to Fix It)Note: This is an excerpt from my new book, THE ART OF WHISPERING TO MACHINES, available now on Amazon.
Joshua McDonaldJan 16, 2026Why AI Forgot Your Name: The “Vanishing Whiteboard” TheoryAI doesn’t have a brain. It has a sliding window. Here is how to stop it from losing your data.
Joshua McDonaldJan 16, 2026How to Stop AI Hallucinations by Teaching It to Say “I Don’t Know”Your AI isn’t lying to deceive you. It’s lying to please you. Here is the engineering fix.
Joshua McDonaldJan 15, 2026Why Most AI Models Can't Count the Letter "R" in StrawberryA non-technical guide to Tokenization: why AI fails at simple math and spelling.
Joshua McDonaldJan 13, 2026Stop Treating AI Like a Brain. Treat It Like a Stadium.Why your prompts are failing and the single mental shift that fixes them.
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 McDonaldMay 14, 2021Crockpot Pumpkin and Chorizo ChiliThis easy to make slow cooker chili combines the spices of India and Mexico to create a truly unique taste.
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 McDonaldAug 3, 2020Money can’t buy loyalty — intrinsic and extrinsic motivationThere are two two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within. It’s something you do for the love…
Joshua McDonaldJun 29, 2020Laid Off — What to Do When You Don’t Know What to DoPractical tips for anyone looking for work
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.
