Writing

Essays from the second act.

This side of the site holds both professional and personal writing. The labels matter. Some pieces are about software, solo development, and the operating layer behind the work. Others are memoir pieces and stories that belong to the same life but a different mode.

Read the Latest Essay About Alan

Published

Memoir

A Veritable Island

On Pontal, Ilhéus, and the 15-minute neighborhood that didn't need urban planners.

Software Essay

The Go-Between, Revisited

On building with AIs that don't know each other exists.

Software Essay

I Used My Own Marketplace to Buy a Marketing Plan for My Marketplace

Fifteen days after launch, the loop closed.

Memoir

Doc

A fighter, a diplomat, a revolver, and a birthday dinner at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Software essay

The Go-Between

On platform fees, Graeber, Taleb, and what a middleman actually owes you.

Memoir · Agentic Age

Não Sei Nada

A guide to the agentic age for people whose intellectual peer group has thinned out. The first skill is copy/paste.

Software essay

Easing In

How I got from twenty years of files on three systems to a practice that actually works. It was not a straight line.

Software essay

The One-Person Operating System

What solo development actually requires once the demo exists: memory, issues, deploys, credentials, and a working layer that reduces context switching.

Memoir

My Florida Vacation

Three days after moving into a house north of Columbia, it caught fire. That was only the first problem.

How To Read This Section

The writing and the prototype work are related, but they are not the same genre. Keeping them on one site makes sense. Labeling them clearly matters just as much.

Software essays explain how I think and work. Memoir pieces explain the longer arc behind that work. Both belong here.