This batch is personal, about pace, direction, and what gets lost when you optimize for speed.
Devon Garbalosa’s I Left Engineering Management is the rawest career essay I’ve read this year. He built 34 apps and 40+ microservices from scratch at a Fortune 100 financial services company. The reward for building well was a management title with 16 reports across two countries. Within two years he was cycling through anxiety attacks, overeating, vaping, not sleeping. At one point he stepped away from managing for six weeks and shipped more alone than his team had in a year. Not because they were bad, because he couldn’t multiply himself through others, and nobody taught him how. The turning point was meeting Laravel employees at PHPxNYC, applying for a Solutions Architect role, withdrawing because his wife was seven months pregnant, and having Laravel tell him they’d wait. He took the job. Sixteen reports to zero. Fortune 100 to Series A. “The system that promotes builders out of building, that takes your best work and rewards you by making sure you never do it again, that system doesn’t have a category for what I did.”
Dave Rupert’s People Are Not Friction is a direct pushback against the “frictionless” language creeping into AI product marketing. When you talk about automating away friction, you’re often talking about automating away people, the meetings, the reviews, the conversations where tacit knowledge gets transferred. His point: the Gell-Mann amnesia effect means LLMs sound brilliant until you ask them about something you know deeply. People aren’t obstacles to efficiency. They’re the context that makes work meaningful.
Matthias Ott’s The Shape of Friction is the design counterpart to Rupert’s essay. Not all friction is bad. Some friction is load-bearing: it slows users down at exactly the moments they should think carefully. Confirmation dialogs before destructive actions. Typing a project name to confirm deletion. The essay reframes friction as a design variable with a shape, and warns against flattening it uniformly when some of it is doing important structural work.
Mario Zechner’s Thoughts on Slowing the F*ck Down is a game developer’s pushback against velocity as an end in itself. He’s watched speed become the primary metric in creative work and argues that deliberate slowness, choosing to spend more time than is technically necessary, produces work that’s qualitatively different. There’s something in here about reclaiming the relationship between effort and time that resonates with the AI-tools conversation, especially when those tools promise infinite acceleration. The question isn’t “how fast can you go?” but “what quality of thinking is possible at different speeds?”
Becoming a Day Person is a quiet personal essay about restructuring your relationship with time. The author describes the shift from night-owl productivity to early mornings, not as a productivity hack but as a change in how the day feels. The mornings have a different quality of attention. It’s a small essay, but it pairs nicely with the other pieces here about pace and intention, and I found it worth reading slowly.