I Spent Twenty Years in the Future
On international teams, the distance between people and their countries, and the world that was supposed to be coming.
Continue reading →More dispatches · 14 posts
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01
Who Owns Web 4.0?
Three companies, three bets on where platform control lives. And a geopolitical shift that might matter more than any of them.
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02
The Supply Side of Web 4.0
The SaaS era was the golden age of building interfaces. What comes next rewards capability, not chrome.
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03
Why Web 4.0 Might Succeed Where Web 3 Failed
Web 3 had architecture too. The difference is that Web 4.0 solves a problem people actually have.
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04
OpenClaw, the End of the SaaS Playbook, and the Arrival of Web 4.0
OpenAI's OpenClaw hire was framed as a talent acquisition. Zoom out and you see a platform stack being assembled in plain sight — model, agent, app store, distribution, device. The opening move of Web 4.0.
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05
On Boilerplate and the Death of Old Principles
When a machine can rewrite a module in seconds, do YAGNI and DRY still earn their place? The principles survive — but the reasons we hold them shouldn't.
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06
On AI and Existential Fears
Two years through Copilot, Cursor, Devin, Claude, Codex — and every stage of the hype cycle that came with them. Where AI-assisted coding actually helps, and where the wonder runs out.
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07
The game has changed
Modern football killed the specialist. The same shift has been hitting engineering teams for years — and most leadership models haven't caught up.
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08
Our GraphQL learnings and observations
Two years in with GraphQL at scale. What we underestimated, where the hype breaks down, and the parts of the technology that still need to grow up.
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09
On Agile Codebases
Agility isn't a process. It's the technical decisions you made six months ago. The XING One codebase choices that kept us able to actually inspect and adapt.
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10
The initial game plan
Long-term plans in big-company IT go stale fast. Two principles — reduce risk early, make corrections cheap — that shaped how we rolled XING One into production.
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11
Choosing the right technology for XING One
Premortems, throwaway prototypes, and the discipline to ignore what your team already knows. Why Scala beat the languages we were more comfortable in.
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12
Kickstarting the XING One project
Most projects don't fail for technical reasons. The naming, mission, and lighthouse-project work that set up XING One before a single line was written.
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13
What Made Us Interested In Graphql
Four years of API pain at XING — the field-selection hacks, the REST-vs-mobile tug-of-war, and the moment GraphQL stopped feeling theoretical.
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14
Per Aspera Ad Astra
Series intro: how four people set out to introduce GraphQL at XING, and the playbook for landing platform-shift technology inside a 1.3k-person company.