Project Principles

These days, coding looks like a sustainable career only for the committed, the unusually gifted, or those who treat Python and React as a calling. They are the new starving artists! Life didn’t used to be this way. Three years ago, the Fortune 1000 couldn’t find enough engineers to fill demand. Now, with the infusion of Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, the market appears flooded. Too many job seekers. Not enough options. Worse, a quick Google search presents mountains of articles on the gutting of tech middle management.

Blood is in the water.

For those pursuing computer science degrees, that’s an even tougher road. Imagine toiling for eight semesters, only to realize your skills are no longer needed and hedge funds have snapped up every starter home. Do you pivot degrees? Move in with Mom and Dad? Well, that sucks. Yes, the tech industry promised a bright future a decade ago while dangling incentives galore. Free food. Ping-pong tables in every conference room. Six-figure salaries. Anything to tempt an incoming kid from the classics or a career in medicine. Fast-forward, CEOs are getting booed at graduation ceremonies, and students are pivoting to other pastures.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Early 2000s, I remember colleagues lamenting their children’s law degrees. Why, they shouted to the heavens after investing seven years into higher education. Then the market collapsed. Granted, recent hiring statistics suggest it has somewhat recovered.

Yet there are winners when change is afoot.

For the hobbyist, or hack coder; well, it’s a great time to be alive. Technology opens new doors. Yes, one truly can build anything given infinite compute tokens, shifting the Mendoza line of what’s possible.¹ Unique calendar management applications. 3-D printing CAD projects. Home automation setups. Or take the hard path and file the LLC paperwork for a startup, pulling the Infinity Gauntlet out of the safe, Thanos-style, to say, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”² The distance between strange idea and working prototype has never been shorter.

Right Place, Right Time

If anyone can build, the question becomes who bothers? And why? Most risk-averse types tinker as a hobby, iterating, until said project launches or finds a following. There are infinite books in the wild about launching a startup, all with common themes. Quit your job. Find a problem that you care so much about that you’ll go to great lengths to fix. And only choose projects that will scale to a billion. That’s Peter Thiel’s advice. Complicated and controversial guy dabbling in the Anti-Christ these days, but Zero to One remains a worthwhile short read, even if it’s showing its age.³

As for me, I’ve never leaped. Never had the idea to cast it all away. Or wasn’t in the right place to meet that magical founder. Yes, Steve Ballmer was Bill Gates’s roommate. Even the real-life Social Network losers scored billions by being Harvard graduates. Granted, I have burned the midnight oil at mid-sized companies and advised more than a few startups chasing wild dreams. I’ve seen successful launches. And hyper-scale growth. Oh, I have tasted failure. But I’ve never tossed the job aside, said this is the way, and hired a team. Or recruited them, only offering Domino’s carry-out for payment. Call me conservative. Or I don’t have the commitment. Maybe I’m unwilling to roll the dice.

Or it’s some combination of all three. I suspect risk tolerance, more than talent, is the leading indicator for future performance. That doesn’t mean Elon isn’t a genius. He might be, but he has an appetite for risk depending on the business model—and acts on it.

Roadmaps and SPQR

If risk tolerance sets the starting line, AI moves it, measured in degrees. The cost to tinker and build prototypes has flattened. Move fast. Break things. Or toy around.

Yet it never hurts to know what you’re doing. I often don’t, deciding to hop in the car with a destination in mind but not having the exact route planned. That can be freeing or catastrophic, especially if the architecture is left to chance. That’s why teams have roadmaps, blueprints, and product plans. For the nontechnical crew, some map out a career. Or sales leaders jot down extensive account planning documents. For the political types, try it with a campaign—picking a winner helps.

Plans are funny things. You build, jot down ideas, and consider your direction, both in life and in the day-to-day. But a plan only answers what comes next, never why any of it matters. I do love the movie Gladiator, that famous line, “What you do in life echoes in eternity.” A profound thought, but does anyone step back and live by a greater ethos? How often do we examine our values?

In an age of constant distraction, I’d argue it’s hard enough to find time to consider heavier things. Maximus can stand up and shout to the masses before battle because his army is preparing to charge down a hill and clash swords with demon-like hordes. They aren’t fighting just to survive; his army is battling for something more. SPQR. The Senate and People of Rome.

Is there a man alive who doesn’t think Roman Empire four times daily? I mean, giddy up and let’s go.

For those who have visited the Eternal City, those four letters are tattooed on concrete walls. Even the manhole covers carry the ominous weight of history. They are reminders, but rarely do we consider how aspirational they were. Roman politics was unequal and conflict-ridden—playing emperor could be a short-term gig. But the phrase meant the state’s power acted in the name of everyone. A way of life conquered the known world. These values helped hold the city-state together for centuries. Some call these First Principles. Our country has these too, written down in our Declaration of Independence and entrenched within our Constitution. Everyone knows the line:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Hey, it took one hundred fifty more years, give or take, to add the ladies through the 19th Amendment, but we got there. Not to play what-about-ism, but we did get there.

First Principle Lessons

I think we forget about founding first principles, sadly, either through social media noise or lack of education (my kid didn’t have enough civics in high school in sacrifice to the math and science gods). Sigh, only because I loved social studies. And when a country forgets its founding terms, it stops noticing when they’re traded away. Why wasn’t there more outrage about the president accepting a golden crown? America is the country that broke away from a king, after all. Sure, a gracious leader shakes hands while arguing over our founder’s promise. But a true champion of American values breaks that glass case, yanks the atrocity out, and tosses it on the red carpet, denting the golden calf on the tarmac. If the leader of the free world played a 1990s action hero, a declaration of war might have followed. Yeah, I’m thinking of you, Harrison Ford in Air Force One.

Rash? South Korea gave this tone-deaf gift, not the Russians. But we don’t all need a presidential moment. Most of us get smaller tests.

Guys like me face few defining moments in life. I don’t claim to be a fictional Maximus, or true Roman soldier, or a sitting President. Still, I’d argue few of us even write down what we believe in. What lines should never be crossed? Truth? Justice? The American Way? Instead, we focus on taking our kids to school, debating the next work project, checking off one of many to-do list items, or fighting traffic. Lunch gets mingled in there somewhere on a good day. Or that workout routine?

Do we even have time for that? It is a busy life.

In a society of relative ease, compared to how the Romans went about it, where are the North Stars? How often does anyone ponder echoing in eternity?

Again, I love movies about gladiators, not the creepy kind.⁴ Sure, the greatest film ever is Highlander. But runner-up? Gladiator. That Maximus guy had a point. The trouble comes when grandiose language becomes odd branding instead of a simple call for action.

Tech founders often say dumb things: we’re in a fight to bring AI to the masses. Then they do worse. I saw a CEO smash a competitor’s laptop with a baseball bat on stage. A kid or charity could have made good use of it.

Anyone can have an ethos. Why not me? Or you? More importantly, how do you get started?

Prometheus Project Principles

Try sweating the small stuff and build a list of principles for any project. Choose one. It doesn’t have to impact a billion users. The best ones often don’t. Think graduation party. Or setting up a 5K charity event. Vacation plans are great too. And then, list the project principles that are immutable. These are the lines that never get crossed. This can be around resources. Or time. Place. Do this before you hop into planning, spend a day on it. Maybe two.

Amazon is famously known for its leadership principles. If you work here, as I do at the time of this writing, they are recited in the hallways. The one making the rounds on podcasts is a mental model around one-way doors within Bias for Action. High-level, two-way doors are easily reversible. Go try it. See what happens. If it breaks, going back in time is easy. But imagine decisions where the key is gone? Or the door vanishes altogether? What if you can’t go back? I’d argue this is a somewhat misunderstood principle because given enough money or time, anything can happen.

For those that read this humble newsletter, I wrote about Charta months ago; it manages my website’s content now, but I decided to expand a CLI interface into a full-blown writing platform. I’ve always written in multiple tools: Word, Ulysses, Bear, Scrivener, and Drafts. But now the AI overlords have given me the ability to build whatever I want. Think of Prometheus stealing the power of fire from Zeus and giving it to humans. That’s not always a good thing—the titan’s story doesn’t end well for those fluent in Edith Hamilton or Percy Jackson, and this is my first go at user-friendly software (my hobbyist work is back-end analytics in nature).

If you’ve never toyed with building a writing application, immense engineering goes into the typing interface. Speed. Responsiveness. Smoothness. Short-cuts. This leads to questions. Leverage Monaco, what VS Code and other code editors (think Cursor) use? What about CodeMirror 6, the engine behind Obsidian and other tools? And, of course, there is always build your own from the ground up. All have tradeoffs.

Choosing tends to produce products that are either transformative or over-engineered. The danger is that hard-core developers tend to ask: “What’s the best editor?” Writers: “How do I get from idea to publication?”

The latter is a systems question, not a product-design choice.

The problem with any project is bloat, a scope that never ends. I’d argue that move fast and break things morphs into tentacles, reaching into a messy albatross of despair. So I decided to write down my first principles for Charta. No gladiator wars. Or accepting poorly symbolic crowns. It was a quick exercise, a short manifesto that I uploaded into my project’s sprints folder.

Calendar weeks later, I hated how links appeared in my typing interface. What kicked off this entire project was a WordPress civil war combined with a newspaper story about Albert Bigelow, an early pioneer of non-violent civil disobedience. I had this ethos about not losing my work down to the individual period. And that can mean many things, but, mostly, I didn’t want my writing trapped in a CMS or proprietary format any longer. We could debate .txt versus .md files as the proper formatting instead of doing it true old school style like a monastery monk once upon a time, putting pen to paper to copy chapter and verse.

If you’ve subscribed, contributed, or don’t delete my random newsletters for more than a minute, you know I produce sources and pride myself on receipts. These aren’t hard and fast bibliography rules, but I use them to reinforce my points. And, sometimes, this lifetime writing experiment is more for me than you. Yes, I want to remember what I read. This means links are important.

If you’re a markdown geek, these are typed as follows: . The label goes in brackets. The link goes inside the parentheses. And when that renders in your email or on a webpage, you’ll see a colored word. Or it’ll appear underlined. That plain-text syntax remains durable and portable, which is why I want to preserve it down to the last byte. But it creates a practical problem inside a writing tool.

Charta’s core editor shows the full URL. Not always a biggie. But if you’re sourcing from a government or obscure website, the links can go on forever and that mucks up the page. So annoying. Most editors want the interface to appear glorious but that can lead to challenges for tooling that cares about editorial flow or doesn’t want to lose the URL on export. It’s a darned engineering rat hole nightmare. There are solutions. I’ve tried them all, became bigly pissed about the fiasco, and settled on building my own typing engine.

But I remembered those darned principles. There were a half dozen, and I was violating the immutable one. The core. Never lose the work by being trapped in a messy ecosystem.

A simple, yet utterly annoying, product flaw almost sent me down a token-consuming, time-sucking nightmare.

I realized Charta’s value wasn’t meant to be: “I have the nicest text field.” It’s: “I have a trustworthy way to move from manuscript to publication with editorial intelligence layered throughout.” The editor matters enormously, but it is in service of a system. It’s about never losing your electronic files to Microsoft or Google or insert backstabbing company of choice that chooses to mine your data. And, of course, the government says that’s just fine.

Months of development work have revealed lessons about building, well, anything. Every time I’ve hit a friction point, my instinct has shifted: “Can I solve this by improving the system?” Rather than: “Can I make the editor more clever on a whim?” That is a small, practical lesson Charta keeps teaching me. You see, principles are not only for companies, constitutions, or gladiators. They make ordinary decisions easier too.

Simple Steps

How do you want to begin the day? Leap out of bed? Or linger, hitting the alarm clock’s snooze too much. It’s hard to leap out of bed if you don’t have a strategy, no idea what the day might look like. Where are you going? What are you doing? Do you have limiting principles? It doesn’t matter if you’re fighting the hordes to save Rome or rebuilding a car or constructing a writing tool or planning an epic Disney vacation before Fastpass package 29C became a thing.

The best days at the park? Those were the ones when the family had the plan.

We’d reserve the early morning character breakfast, well before the park opened. And, of course, we were waiting at the gates before Mickey greeted us on Main Street. Those extra minutes gave us at least two to three turns at Space Mountain before the lines leaked outside.

Space Mountain was the payoff, but the plan was what made the whole day work—even when we abandoned it for a shorter ride time or a Dole Whip. That was the point of having one: not to control every minute, but to know what mattered enough that a detour didn’t become the whole trip.

Project principles work the same way. They won’t make the work easy, or guarantee an outcome. But when the inevitable rat hole appears—and it will—they remind you why you started, before the digging takes you somewhere you never meant to go.

Footnotes