in|retrospect
Posts on page 4
A Retreat from Game Subscriptions
Remember the persistent idea of an evergreen gaming service, a "Netflix for games," that gamers had been clamoring for since…well, since Netflix became a household name? We did enjoy a brief era of subscription gaming, but just…
Review: On Writing Well
I was thinking of The Elements of Style. I asked ChatGPT for suggestions to get deeper into the craft of writing. To its credit, none of its recommendations were hallucinated—I double-checked—but instead of that quintessential instructional manual, it…
Executing Organizational Cartography
A few years back, during my early days at Affirm, a couple of us engineering leaders[1] were trying and struggling to orchestrate a reorg across our teams. There were a number of strong personalities to manage and key communications…
Year in Review — 2025
This was a quick year. Perhaps it’s an effect from aging time acceleration—when the subjective experience of the passage of time speeds up as I get older. Maybe it’s the result of throwing myself more into work…
Law of Conservation of Vehicular Modularity
Most in the startup world have heard of the idea of disruption; many have peddled it for their own benefits. This is, after all, the theory that gives hope for David to topple Goliath. But the original term is a…
Year of the Linux Console, Steam Edition
A few weeks back, Valve—the company most famously behind the Steam platform for PC games—announced a trio of hardware devices slated for an early 2026 release. Adding to their already-excellent portable-gaming console, the Steam Deck, they'll…
