About

I write nonfiction about two things that turned out to be the same thing: how people who solve problems well actually think, and why people who think differently keep misreading each other.

I came up through software. Assembler abends out of college, a long stretch in enterprise systems, then about a decade in fraud analytics, where I learned that the most expensive failures are usually not bugs. They are correct systems doing exactly what somebody asked for, in a world nobody checked.

My grandmother programmed with punch cards. She told me that not everyone sees logic, and that the people who don't will make try after try and still get it wrong, because they were never seeing the whole picture. That has held up better than most things I have been taught since.

What's here

There are three notebooks on this site, and they run at different speeds.

Syntax Is the Easy Part is about thinking like a programmer, written for people who are not programmers and for people who are but were never handed the concepts. This one has a finished book behind it.

Neurodivergence Is Not a Personality Type is about cognitive architectures and the collisions between them. It is written from lived experience, ADHD with sensory overlap. It is not a clinical guide and it is not a list of hacks. The argument is that recognition is the repair.

Notes is everything else. Tools, process, the writing life, whatever I am building at the time.

The disclaimers, up front

I am not a doctor and nothing here is a diagnosis. If you want treatment or accommodations, get evaluated. But you do not need a diagnosis to recognize yourself in a description, and the threshold that matters is not a checklist. It is whether the pattern is affecting your life.

I also do not write from the position that either kind of brain is the correct one. Both sides of every collision usually make complete sense from the inside. That is the entire point.