Year seven begins with the fork from #146 already resolving: I spent the fortnight writing the platform-team proposal — headcount, charter, the paved-road philosophy (#106) promoted from metaphor to org chart. If it lands, I’ll be a senior engineer who spends 60% of the time on systems whose users are OTHER ENGINEERS. Internal platforms are products with the most brutally honest customers alive: they sit ten feet away and they WILL file the feedback in person, at lunch, forever. Terrifying. Correct. More as the org decides.
The sports year opened with Vinicius Junior not just breaking into the Real Madrid starting lineup but dismantling opponents with electric pace — a teenager who played like latency doesn’t apply to him (the Mbappé clause, #134, now cross-sport). Dynasties don’t fall to slightly-better; they fall to different-generation (#134’s deprecation round, newcomer edition).
Elsewhere: the government shutdown is the longest in history (the tech-adjacent notes: unpaid TSA agents, frozen H-1B processing, and .gov TLS certificates EXPIRING because the renewal humans are furloughed — #003’s cert lesson performed by a superpower); and the “10-Year Challenge” meme has everyone posting 2009-vs-2019 photos, which the paranoid corner of the industry notes is a beautifully labeled facial-aging training dataset, crowdsourced free. Post accordingly.
TIL: writing a headcount proposal is writing an RFC where the resources are PEOPLE — same discipline, higher stakes, and the rollback plan section gets very quiet. Orgs are architecture (#064); I’m apparently applying to be a load balancer.