Engineering
is poker

Engineering strategy is winning in the long run.

You don't choose the cards. You choose how you play them, and how many hands you get to sit for until you run out of money. Most engineering decisions are made on incomplete information, under time pressure, against a market that isn't even trying to beat you; it's just indifferent. That's a solvable problem, and it gets solved the way poker does: by making decisions with positive expected value often enough that variance stops deciding the outcome.

I write engineering strategy reports and publish them in full, including the parts I got wrong. Every claim carries where it came from. The orange ones are the ones I'm still guessing at.


essay2026-08-098 minThe Moneypot Nobody Spends vs the Work Nobody DoesSolidus was forked from Spree in 2015. In 2025 Spree came back from the dead with money and AI tooling, so I went to check whether the fork was in trouble. What I found was stranger: a healthy delivery machine, a full treasury, and nobody left whose job it was to decide anything. Then I posted the draft where the project lives — and it answered.

existing-system auditrev. 27118 claims94 minliveSolidusEngineering strategy audit of Solidus, the Rails commerce framework. An existing-system audit run entirely on public evidence, with a proposed policy register.

The framework

ESF v0.7

An operating contract for engineering strategy: reduce risk, compound the delivery machine, and maximise the probability that the right thing gets built. It's the method behind every report here, free and open.

Read the framework

What it costs to be honest

observed58%68
web27%32
stakeholder10%12
inferred5%6
assumed0%0

Every report opens with this meter, before the conclusions. It is counted from the claims in the content, so it cannot drift from what the document actually says.