The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Gapingvoid

gapingvoid.com

Insights You Can See. Gapingvoid works with leaders to design culture intentionally.

Essays / personalEngineering management / careers

’10’15’20’25
Posts
4,647 from 4 Jan 2009 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (121 in the last year)
Kind
company blog
Feed
https://www.gapingvoid.com/feed/

Latest

October 2026

  1. The Paradox of Progress
  2. The Lost Art of Nerding Out
  3. Stop Waiting For A Sign
  4. Don’t Confuse the Trophy with the Triumph
  5. The World is Not A Beta Test
  6. The Dark Side of Devotion
  7. When Winning Becomes Losing
  8. Without The Meaning Chain, There Is No Kill Chain
  9. Ritz-Carlton Was Right. Karl Marx Was Wrong.
  10. Agree On How To Disagree
  11. The Audacity of Optimism
  12. Wrong Way, Right Direction
  13. The Work Between the Work

September 2026

  1. Be Hungry, Not Thirsty
  2. When Everyone Sounds Like a Genius
  3. Maps Are Models, Models Are Maps
  4. Warren Buffett’s Final Investment
  5. What We Can Learn From A Six-Dollar Chicken
  6. Love Thy Competitor
  7. The Hard Part Is Loving The Hard Part
  8. The Iron Law Of Excellence
  9. If It Belongs to Everybody, It Belongs to Nobody
  10. It’s The Meaning, Not The Mascot
  11. What Are You Laboring For?
  12. If Nobody’s Pissed Off, Try Harder
  13. Be Emotional
  14. If There’s A Wii, There’s A Way

August 2026

  1. In Defense Of Vertical Drinking
  2. It Was Dolly’s World, We Were Just Living In It
  3. It’s What Happens Around The Coffee Cup That’s Interesting
  4. Find The Side Door
  5. Denormalizing Hypernormalization
  6. The First Tool Humans Ever Built
  7. Nudge or Sludge?
  8. “That’s What The Money Is For,” He Said, Mistakenly
  9. The Price Of Waiting
  10. Build Yourself A Fortress
  11. When Control Creates Chaos
  12. Ridiculous Is The Future
  13. Power Corrupts, Then Again So Does Gravity

July 2026

  1. All Maps Lie
  2. Show Don’t Sell
  3. Yesterday +1
  4. You’re Not Stuck *In* Traffic, You *Are* Traffic
  5. Today’s Clever is Tomorrow’s Cringe
  6. Symbols Beat Slogans
  7. An Ode To Giving Up
  8. How to Survive Your Own Death
  9. Culture Bank: Insufficient Funds
  10. The Problem With Good Intentions
  11. The ROI Of Fireworks
  12. How To Win The Blame Game

June 2026

  1. The Minotaur Was Never The Problem
  2. History Doesn’t Use Cruise Control
  3. Why People Really, Really Like Using The Word, “Transformation”
  4. Don’t Be ‘Normal Spongebob’
  5. A Story Is Only As Good As The Reason For Telling It
  6. The Joy of Seeing
  7. Beware of Best Practices
  8. Winning Isn’t For Everyone
  9. Be A Butcher
  10. Nobody Is Working This Thursday
  11. What Happens When A Legend Forgets Who It Is?

May 2026

  1. The UK Is Running On Outdated Software
  2. Why Do We Keep Killing The Golden Goose?
  3. What Memorial Day Teaches Us About The Nature Of Sacrifice
  4. What Made Alexander So Great
  5. How to Control What You Can’t Control
  6. Death by 1000 Optimizations
  7. If Resumes are Dead, What Takes Their Place?
  8. Inform. Educate. Entertain.
  9. When In Doubt, Swim Upstream.
  10. When Airlines Remembered What Really Fuels their Business

April 2026

  1. Colorless, Shapeless Orb
  2. Going Electric
  3. America’s Founding Mother
  4. The First Rule of Fight Club
  5. The Moon was Never the Point
  6. What Viking Cuisine Can Tell Us About Innovation
  7. Mommy, Where Does Meaning Come From?

March 2026

  1. You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours
  2. Meliora
  3. Aim
  4. Who Knows What
  5. Beyond Glamour: The Staples Baddie
  6. What the 19th Century Socialite & Modern Day Host Teach Us About Leadership
  7. Go Your Own Way
  8. How to MacGyver It
  9. Scripts Not Required
  10. The Market for Something to Believe In

February 2026

  1. Omoiyari
  2. Context is King
  3. Sanctuary
  4. The Case for Heresy
  5. Dancing with Your Default Mode
  6. Fox or Hedgehog?
  7. $12 Billion Later
  8. Elegance Compounds
  9. What 20,000 Snails & One Trader Joe’s Bag Share

January 2026

  1. Are you Bowing to An Empty Throne?
  2. How You Say It
  3. They Won’t Build You a Statue
  4. Just the Sprinkles on Top
  5. In Defense of the Long Way
  6. The Value of Values

December 2025

  1. “You too?”
  2. The Start Is Always Hardest
  3. The Workaround to Murphy’s Law
  4. Why the Sun Always Wins
  5. He Never Repeated a Formula, Not Even His Own
  6. The Case for Crazy
  7. He Just Dragged His Fingers Through the Sand

November 2025

  1. Thank you, shitshow
  2. Just Fall
  3. Boundaries Beget Belonging
  4. Care is a Risk. Do It Anyway.
  5. Nobody Votes for Bad Bread
  6. Culture vs. Command
  7. Fighters versus Fakers
  8. Innovation is Forgiveness
  9. Warrior in the Garden or a Gardener in War?

October 2025

  1. The Hydra Problem
  2. We are All Spies, We Just Don’t Know It
  3. Take Off Your Shirt
  4. When never enough is no longer enough
  5. The Two Headed Horse
  6. Ben, Jerry, and the Myth of Company Values
  7. Life is a Feast, Not a Recipe
  8. What the Tea Leaves Show Us About Leadership
  9. Script or Sprezzatura?
  10. The Antidote for “Cornflake Brain”

September 2025

  1. Creativity: The Antidote to Elite Oversupply
  2. God is in the Gaps
  3. It’s the “And”
  4. Going Upstream
  5. Why Does Mattering… Matter?
  6. Infinite Game or Bottomless Pit?
  7. What Leaders Can Learn From Type-A Personalities
  8. The Power of A Word
  9. When Does It Become Meaningful

August 2025

  1. The Knowing of Not Knowing
  2. The Problem with Pilgrimages
  3. Two Words that Built Apollo
  4. The Art of Saying Less
  5. Striving or Boredom, Your Call
  6. All Signal No Substance

July 2025

  1. You’re Looking for Help in the Wrong Place
  2. The Most Important Word in the English Language
  3. Leaders Don’t Get to Hide
  4. It’s Not You, It’s Your Frame

Every year

2026 1052025 942024 1222023 1212022 822021 702020 1102019 2212018 2332017 2592016 2572015 1372014 702013 1402012 1612011 3322010 3342009 1,799