Engineering Chaos | The Gap Between Promise and Practice

Engineering Chaos

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

June 5th, 2025. "You have cancer." The room was as sterile as the doctor's delivery to my 83-year-old father. At that moment, I searched desperately for something—anything—to look at besides the doctor's face. Some distraction to help me hide the welling in

The Dichotomy of Saving a Life

The Dichotomy of Saving a Life

"DOES ANYBODY KNOW CPR?!" A phrase that serves as both interrogative and demand. On one hand, it's a question seeking help. On the other, it's a request for help to help—an invitation to cross the invisible line between witness and participant, between the

The Great Taco Paradox

The Great Taco Paradox

Nearly 60% of Americans who support border crackdowns can't imagine life without tacos. That's not a joke—that's America. Last Tuesday, parked outside Los Amigos Mexican Restaurant: a lifted Chevy Silverado, chrome everything, MAGA sticker collection including "Just a Mom Trying Not to

American Reality, Disney Edition

American Reality, Disney Edition

"The irony looms large — seeking refuge from American decline inside America’s most successful export of soft power.” The MAGA hat stands out against EPCOT’s gleaming Spaceship Earth like a coding error — American exceptionalism confronting Disney’s sanitized globalism. Its wearer, sunburned and sweating through a golf shirt,

Selective Efficiency: The Bureaucratic Bait-and-Switch

Selective Efficiency: The Bureaucratic Bait-and-Switch

The Department of Homeland Security quietly updated its surveillance guidelines on a Tuesday. No press conference. No announcement. Just a few words deleted from page 47 of a policy manual. "Sexual orientation" and "gender identity"—gone. It's the bureaucratic equivalent of erasing someone from

The Corporate Retreat

The Corporate Retreat

Gil Scott-Heron was right. Corporations won’t save us. They never planned to. A few weeks ago, Kendrick Lamar lit up the Super Bowl halftime show with a performance that gained another 11 million views after airing. Between prison yard imagery, dancers forming the American flag, and Samuel L. Jackson’

So Sick: Threat Hunting and Data Engineering with Pattern Matching

So Sick: Threat Hunting and Data Engineering with Pattern Matching

The security industry has a remarkable talent for taking simple problems and wrapping them in increasingly complex solutions. While everyone’s busy adding “AI-powered” to their product descriptions, three algorithms from the 1970s have been quietly working in the background showing the ‘70s may have been rough for fashion, but

The Art of Nonversation and Business Speak: When Words Mean Nothing While Saying…Well…Nothing

The Art of Nonversation and Business Speak: When Words Mean Nothing While Saying…Well…Nothing

“Language doesn’t exist to oppress us. It exists to promote the clarity of expression.” - John Green. I love John Green. He’s my favorite internet personality turned author (in the order I discovered him). And boy, do I wish I had stumbled across him years ago, not considering

angry kid with arms crossed

Data Models and Other Professional Delusions

Data Models Are Like Assholes: Everyone Has One and They All Stink. (This was my original title but in an edit room floor decision I decided to change it. It is a good time to set the disclaimer that this blog contains the opinions of me personally and nobody else

Engineering Chaos: Where Security, Leadership, and Neurodiversity Collide

Engineering Chaos: Where Security, Leadership, and Neurodiversity Collide

In tech, we love our illusions of control. We write postmortems about “unexpected behavior” and create dashboards that promise total visibility. Reality has other plans. The Failed Experiment That Started It All A month ago, I announced plans to open-source some security tools. Like most tech initiatives, it started with