Software on Bifurcations

Standardize systems, not people

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400

In January 1994, I attended a NEXTSTEP conference in Washington. One of the speakers was Paul Strassmann, a former Director of Defense Information for the United States government. The archived programme places his address on January 26, at the Sheraton Washington.¹

I remember his argument clearly. He described the battlefield as an exceptionally complex setting: decisions of life and death, an adversary potentially as capable as oneself, and a stream of information from satellites, cameras, communications and sensors. In that environment, gathering more data was not enough. The challenge was to identify, at the right moment, what mattered to the person who needed to act.

Software Before the Decision

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400

About fifteen years ago, I took part in developing a project called Meetrical.

The idea was ambitious: use relationships, availability and context to bring possible encounters between people to the surface. The project belonged more to the world of social networks as they existed at the time, but some of its intuitions can now be found in Flechis, a project I am working on today.

To develop Meetrical, we had a team of five developers in India, a project manager and several months ahead of us. We had to produce specifications, answer questions, arbitrate choices, test successive versions and manage everything that normally accompanies software development.