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Gordon

@gordon.bsky.social

Everything around me was someone’s lifework.

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gordonbrander.comAug 1, 2026

From Three Horizons, The Patterning of Hope , by Bill Sharpe Horizon 1: The status quo. The current, dominant business or system, which should be maintained and improved. Horizon 2: The transition zone. The contested space where innovations are…

gordonbrander.comJul 31, 2026

Decomplecting actors

How would Rich Hickey decomplect the actor model ? I’m thinking: Messages: immutable values Queues: actor inboxs (and outboxes) become queues (see Queues decouple producer from consumer ) State: state is stored by ID in a KV store (see…

gordonbrander.comJul 30, 2026

Decomplecting means using IDs

If you're going to decomplect a class into a bunch of component slices, you're going to need a way to tie those slices together. You need identifiers that you can use across multiple systems. So you'll be using a lot of globally-unique identifiers…

patternsoftware

gordonbrander.comJul 21, 2026

Startups are waterfall

Process note: One of my lessons-learned from Subconscious was that project management for startups should be done via deadlines and workbacks not via agile methods. Agile is designed for steady-state maintenance. But when you are going from 0-1,…

gordonbrander.comJul 18, 2026

Think about the game theory of coalitions

If there’s a coalition, think about the game theory. Who is participating, and why? Who would defect, and why?

strategysystems

gordonbrander.comJun 26, 2026

Software and seeds

They’re mostly self-sufficient, actually... They all got software and seeds. That’s the basic necessities. - Kim Stanley Robinson , Green Mars Related: Whole Earth Catalog

gordonbrander.comJun 18, 2026

Playing to your outs

"Playing to your outs" is a term from poker by way of Magic The Gathering. The idea is, when you're bound to lose, you gotta stop making sensible plays. Instead, you must identify a specific card or sequence that could still win you the…

startupstrategy

gordonbrander.comJun 17, 2026

Coordination technologies

In chronological* order: Kinship systems Religion Art Clothing/jewelry Music Gift exchange Language Oral recitation Written language Law Money Bureaucracy Voting Double-entry bookkeeping Facts Scientific method Peer review Printing Markets…

anthropocenecoordination

gordonbrander.comJun 8, 2026

What, so what, now what

Driscoll's model of reflection (Driscoll, 1994): What? So what? Now what? Often used by the intelligence community to structure briefings. Good heuristic for generalized problem solving .

storytellingstrategy

gordonbrander.comMay 29, 2026

Software that gets distributed to every employee trends toward commodity

Put another way: commodity work breeds commodity software. This is why suites emerge (Office suite). They are lowest-common-denominator, but everything works together. Exception: software for teams that drive direct business value. If a product…

startupstrategy

gordonbrander.comMay 11, 2026

Queues decouple producer from consumer

From The Language of the System , by Rich Hickey : Now we get to moving things around. I think it's one of the things in Clojure maybe I didn't make clear enough because I didn't need to wrap them is that the queues in java.util.concurrent are…

gordonbrander.comOct 28, 2025

Ecosystems are smarter than we are

Beer thought that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, but in their performative ability to solve problems that exceed our cognitive ones. The quote above is from Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic…

cyberneticsecosystems