Atlas · Stories · 17 entries
Stories
The narrative pieces. First-person dispatches, departures and arrivals, the small ones and the big ones — written in the register of someone telling you what happened, not what to think. Author's notes are coming.
- ★ Essentials
- 👍 Good read
- 💩 Not worth it
- 🤓 Language nerd
- 😄 Humor
- 📚 Story / fiction
- 🕹️ Gaming
- 🔮 Called it
- 🤡 Whiffed it
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2023
A Good Day With Jeff
An Amazon offsite at Jeff's boathouse, circa 2004. I'm there to help brainstorm using ML for operations. The technology isn't ready and none of us know it yet. I helpfully suggest Mechanical Turk; the room reacts as if I'd farted. I make our CIO laugh at the wrong moment during Jeff's prepared remarks. At lunch I compliment the wall stereo and Jeff — "instantly very animated" — shows me every feature, including the speaker wires running through the ornamental ceiling chains.
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2018
Why I Left Google to Join Grab
The 2018 post announcing Steve's jump from Google to Grab. Underneath the news is the idea that outlived it: a company's capacity to innovate tracks how close its people sit to customers — Grab's mantra, "go to the ground."
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2016
The Monkey and the Apple
The post that broke a two-year blog silence. Opens with a deadpan husband-and-wife conversation about a rogue Wyvern pet monkey, then expands into a tour of mobile development circa 2016 — iOS vs. Android, Apple's App Store review process, Google Cloud Platform's early roughness, and a quiet endorsement of Kotlin as the future of the JVM.
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2011
eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout
A parody of Amazon's 1-Click patent. Where 1-Click removed all friction, eBay's "10-click Buy It Now" patents the friction itself — a ten-step ordeal of repeated logins, upsells, and password mismatches. Backed by a list of rejected fake patent claims, it is the most Onion-style piece Steve ever wrote, and underneath it a UX rant about dark patterns and monopolies that no longer have to care.
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2010
Blogger Finger
The first half is a comic essay on quitting: he had cared too much, the haters got through, and he came back with the hard-won perspective that nothing on earth makes everyone happy. The second half is the story behind the title — he developed trigger finger in his right hand from practising a Villa-Lobos guitar étude an estimated 650,000 times in five months. More confessional and raw than his other humor pieces.
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2009
The Death of Richard Dawkins
The only piece of fiction I ever shipped on the blog, and the closest thing to a short story in the archive. Near-future sci-fi set a thousand years out and dryly framed as "right around the corner." A 30-year-belated make-up assignment for a bad short story I wrote in high school.
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2009
Story Time
In 2009 Steve sets the technical essays aside and just tells stories — nine of them, in one sitting. The Dash Rendar elevator. His brother Dave's chair at Applebees. Fly lice. Uncle Harold's baby food. The wolf spider. Pants he didn't realise weren't his. Half-blind on a black-diamond ski run with the bindings set too loose.
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2008
A Programmer's View of the Universe, Part 2: Mario Kart
Mario Kart's invisible track boundary as the cleanest example of what Steve calls the One-Way Wall — the kind of boundary that lets you see across it, but not reason past it. The essay's claim is that this is the most important concept in embedded-systems thinking and we have no name for it.
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2008
A Programmer's View of the Universe, Part 1: The Fish
Steve's pet betta noticed something other fish never did: there was an invisible wall around its world. The essay takes that story and runs with it — the fish's view of the universe as a model for the programmer's view of any system too large to hold in one head.
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2008
The Bellic School of Management Training
A violent crime game described in the bland, approving register of a corporate-training press release. The final mission — execute a begging man, or let him walk — is "obviously a metaphor" for putting an employee on a performance plan. Steve files it all as professional development and declares himself a Certified Expert Dev Manager. Then the piece drifts, sincerely, into a lament that nobody remakes the great old games.
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2007
Boring Stevey Status Update
The morning Steve found out — from Reddit, between meetings at the Mountain View HQ — that he was apparently being fired in real time, like OJ in a white SUV. He wasn't. He wrote this 1,000-word status update to prove it. JavaScript 2 squabbles, an Emacs-Lisp interpreter for ECMAScript (the project that became Ejacs / js2-mode), and one quiet line about how his dog Cino can play guitar.
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2007
Stevey's Tech News, Issue #1
A run of fake industry headlines in straight newsroom voice — the content is unhinged, the delivery deadpan. The format is the joke.
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2007
A Noogler's View of Google
Recycled in 2007 from Steve's Google-internal blog — four diary entries from his first weeks on campus in 2005. The badge picture taken at the exact wrong moment. The ball-pit accident in Building 42. Kirkland's Microsoft refugees finally writing code. And the recurring suspicion that the free food means Google is going to eat him.
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2006
Parabola
An airport security guard called T.S. — Type Safety, of course — stands at the head of a slow-moving caterpillar of a queue, enforcing every written and unwritten rule. A dark-haired woman named Anushri rushes up with a handwritten note: her husband is in the E.R., the Red Cross has put her on the next flight, the gate closes in ten minutes. The crowd of programmers in line begins, helpfully, to suggest workarounds: a debugger on his back port, a reboot, reflection, unit tests — every programmer's instinct for hacking around an interface that was never built to make an exception.
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2006
Wizard School
The framing is a put-on — an "eleven years since they opened the first Wizard School" letter to parents asking whether their kids should go. The argument underneath is serious. Steve's point is that programming has always been closer to apprenticed craft than to academic study, and that the industry's pretence otherwise is what makes most programmers worse than they could be.
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2006
Psh. Whatever!
The title is a phrase Dave taught their youngest brother on a road trip — and it is the only joke in the piece. The rest is Steve writing about Dave, who died young; about learning to write from him; and about deciding, here, that the blog would no longer confine itself to software. Steve asked readers at the time not to pass it around. It is filed in this collection for completeness. It is a brother's eulogy.
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2006
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns
A 2006 essay disguised as a fairy tale. In the Kingdom of Javaland, verbs are slaves — every action must be wrapped in a noun, a Manager or a Factory or an Executor, before it is allowed out in public. Steve tells the story deadpan, and the joke became the standard critique of object-oriented overreach.
