The Fourth Rule of The Foundry
My AI agent team's investigator was skimming, and I only caught it by testing it, so I added a tenth agent whose whole job is reading. Part two of two.
We help executive teams turn technology into a strategic advantage–driving growth, efficiency, and long-term scalability.
Latest posts
All posts →Reading the Whole Cookbook to Write One Word: How Inference Works
Training is one enormous bill, paid once. Inference is the meter that never stops running, and an old network saying about bandwidth and latency explains why a chatbot's words arrive one at a time. Part four of six.
[ Ai and llms ] Part 2 of 6 3 min read
Prompting ClaudeIt Copies Everything
I'd like to claim I've never taught a model a bad habit by accident. A model learns from every part of an example, including the parts you didn't mean to teach, so here's how to pick them, on one chart. Part two of six.
[ Tech field day ] [ Security ] 5 min read
Fear and Logging in Las Vegas
I'm headed to Tech Field Day Extra at AWS re:Invent to hear what AWS has to say about security, how it compares with Azure, and where the rest of the industry is going.
I Understand Most of the Words I'm Saying: An Introduction to How LLMs Work
An introduction to a six-part series on how large language models work, from a network engineer who understands most of it and a little of the math.
What we do
AI & Agentic Systems
Architecture and design for AI, ML, LLM, and agentic systems that solve a specific business problem, scoped to what your data, budget, and people can actually support.
Fractional CTO & Strategic Advisory
Independent guidance for the technology leaders you already have, or part-time leadership until you hire one: a strategy built around your constraints that the business can actually execute.
Audit Preparedness
Getting ready for SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, and other security and compliance audits, with the policies, documentation, and daily processes in place well before the audit begins.
Infrastructure & Network Consulting
Independent assessment and design for enterprise networks and infrastructure, backed by hands-on experience designing, building, and fixing networks from mid-market to Fortune 100.
Analyst Services
Landscape assessments, vendor evaluations, and market briefings, written for practitioners rather than procurement committees and without the analyst-firm retainer.
Custom Writing
Custom writing projects, from white papers to technical guides, by a long-time member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors with a deep portfolio of published and private work.
From the archive
Browse the archive →[ Everything else ] 4 min read
On Writing
So, you want to be a writer? Writing is a lonely, dirty, self-deprecating affair. And that’s if you’re good at it. Robert Heinlein said that “writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private …
[ Everything else ] 2 min read
OSX X11 Forwarding
I access various Unix and Unix-like systems all the time. In most cases I don’t ever use any of the GUI tools or applications they may provide. I’ve been using Linux since before Slackware was even a distribution, and …
[ Networking ] 3 min read
Putty
When I think of all of the tools I use on a regular basis to do my job more effectively, there are a handful that stand out as being the most useful of all. As I get the chance, I plan on writing a least a short homage …
[ Everything else ] 1 min read
The Writing Process as Photography
I’m currently working on multiple writing projects, as well as looking forward to beginning a new, different gig tomorrow, so my office is a bit messy. With all the books and studies seeming to point toward messy, …