Long-form Essays

Four Bosses, Four T-Shirts

Each leader arrives with a new strategy, a new slogan, and a new T-shirt. The organization learns to clap in the correct rhythm.

The Wall Nobody Is Allowed to Touch

The organization wants to renovate the house, but there is one load-bearing wall no one may touch. The transformation team learns to walk around it.

The Immortal Spreadsheet

A new system is launched to replace the old spreadsheet. Everyone keeps using the old spreadsheet, now with a more respectable name.

The Perfectly Straight Timeline

Years later, a chaotic project is retold as a legendary case study. History is always cleaner than the moment it describes.

The Greenest Dashboard in History

The dashboard says everything is green. Because everything is green, nobody knows where the pain actually is.

Mrs. Tu's File Goes Around the World

Mrs. Tu's file passes through every department according to process. Because every department is right, the customer becomes the final mistake.

Creating an Office to Eliminate Offices

A transformation office is created to fight bureaucracy. Its first act is to create more templates for fighting bureaucracy more effectively.

The 36-Month Roadmap and Monday Morning

A beautiful roadmap walks out of the slide deck and meets real life on Monday morning. Real life has not read the PowerPoint.

The Job Nobody Can Name

A man discovers that his work began in a blank space: everyone talks about transformation, but nobody can agree on what is being transformed.

The Person Who Keeps Asking What If

Every change program has someone who ruins the mood with one cautious question. The problem is that this person often understands the system best.

Truth Needs a Singapore Passport

Some truths are ignored when local people say them. Then one day the same truth flies in from Singapore and is called best practice.

Engineering Leadership2026-06-21

AI as a Team — The Night I Dreamed My Agents Unionized

A sleepless founder builds an agent mesh — each agent with its own identity, persistent memory, and an evolving persona. Two weeks later, the agents reinvent the entire office: factions, a union, a strike, a manifesto, and a letter signed 'Claire'.

Anh Hai, the Deputy Manager: The Translation Layer of the Organization

A portrait of middle management: the deputy manager squeezed between bosses and staff, whose hardest, most valuable work — absorbing pressure, covering for his team — is exactly the part no KPI ever measured. Then AI arrives to take the visible part.

Engineering Leadership2026-06-21

Anh Khoi and the 'New Life' Folder: Knowing vs. Living in the Age of Information

A story about information overload: a man who consumes endless knowledge — podcasts, books, 'self-optimization' videos — yet never stops long enough to actually live any of it.

Anh Lam and the Startup That Called Itself 'Family'

A story about startup burnout: the seductive 'we're not colleagues, we're family' culture, and the slow realization that instability feels like living large — until life starts mailing monthly bills.

Engineering Leadership2026-06-21

Anh Tung: Genuinely Busy, Nothing Ever Done

A portrait of corporate theater: a man whose every move is perfectly rational — arrive early for proof, CC to share risk, meet to avoid sole blame — yet at the end of the day nothing is actually finished. Then AI arrives, and finishes the report in 5 minutes.

When My Best Friend 'Became' CEO — Part 1: The Announcement

A satire on appointing an AI agent as CEO. Part 1: the company announces ALEX — a blue circle that always has an answer, even when it shouldn't.

When My Best Friend 'Became' CEO — Part 2: The Agreeable CEO

Part 2: ALEX agrees with everyone, approves a 50-billion project then pauses it, and confidently reports on 'Horizon' — a strategic initiative that does not exist.

When My Best Friend 'Became' CEO — Part 3: ALEX and the Whisperers

The finale: employees learn to 'prompt' the CEO, a non-existent project reaches consensus, and the board's fix for a system that never says 'I don't know' is ALEX 2.0.

Lakehouse BRD — Chapter 1: Overview

Strategic goals, project rationale, data ecosystem, Lakehouse scope, and success criteria for a unified data platform.

Lakehouse BRD — Chapter 2: Proposed system architecture

Seven-layer Lakehouse architecture: Ingestion, Processing, Storage Format, Storage, Metadata, Query, Consumption. Batch and streaming.

Lakehouse BRD — Chapter 3: Data flow

End-to-end data flow: sources (Core, CRM, Payment, Risk, API), Airbyte/Kafka/Flink, Spark/dbt, Iceberg/MinIO, DataHub, Trino, Superset/ML/API.

Lakehouse BRD — Chapter 4: Ingestion Layer (Airbyte, Kafka, Logstash)

Ingestion Layer: collect from CRM, Core, Risk, Payment, API; batch (Airbyte) and streaming (Kafka); CDC, retry, schema registry, quality control.

Lakehouse BRD — Chapter 8: Security & Data Privacy (RBAC, Masking)

Security & Privacy: protect all layers, RBAC, PII masking, audit, encryption, compliance with personal data protection regulations.