This corner of the web is my workshop — a place for essays and rough drafts; for ideas to be shaped and refined over time. I write about software, craft, and the ways we might build differently. About small teams that last, tools that respect their users, and the European tradition of the atelier.
Feel free to read about me, browse the archive, or start with something below.
Long-form thinking on software and craft.
The interface moat is dead, that's settled. What nobody asked is what opened. AI revealed two independent axes (Scale and Craft) that the interface moat was hiding. Three quadrants survive; one got repriced to commodity. The question isn't whether the moat is dead. It's which quadrant you're in.
If an ICC judge can be cut off from the global banking system by executive order, so can you. Software has "terroir": where it's built shapes what it is and who can use it. A European terroir is emerging and "where your software lives" is becoming an operational requirement, not a preference.
The factory model made sense when scale was the bottleneck. AI changes the equation. When any idea can be vibe-coded, the future of tech jobs is mastery, not hustle. We need small workshops where masters work alongside learners. They can be "tech ateliers".
We sense something wrong when the update bricks the appliance, the service shuts down with our data, the repair costs more than replacement by design. Ivan Illich called the missing quality "conviviality". The path to it: "transparent technologies" — tools we can understand, inspect, and repair.
A decade in venture-backed startups, consulting taught one lesson: the industry's obsession with scale is broken. The Digital-Mittelstand offers an alternative: mastery over growth, longevity over scale, profitability over prestige.
Recent posts, by date.