What Radical Insider actually is?
I'm a software developer who's been writing code since the Netscape days, back when Mosaic was the browser and HTML tables didn't exist yet, so we faked layouts with <pre> tags and a prayer. I'm also a youth baseball and softball coach. Right now I'm building a real production app called BenchBoard, live scorekeeping and lineup management that coaches use in the field, in 95-degree heat, while an umpire wonders what the hell I’m looking at on my phone. I write about what that's actually like.
That means you get the real story of building software with AI, not the LinkedIn fantasy version. The race conditions the AI quietly built into my live scorekeeping. The architecture it couldn’t see because it’s never stood on a field. The migration I made over the AI’s objections, that turned out to be right. The stuff no AI will ever Google for you. If you’ve ever watched an AI confidently agree with a bad decision and then claim it “could have told you that,” you’ll feel seen here.
But this isn’t only a coding newsletter.
I write about the things underneath the headlines too. Why Microsoft treats Xbox like a rounding error and what that says about how spreadsheets eat culture. Why a dentist shouldn’t talk your kid out of learning to code. What the sideline at a youth game tells you about the country. The difference between information you go get yourself and the processed, entertainment-framed version someone sells back to you.
I’m independent and non-partisan. I care about what’s true, not what team it flatters. I go to primary sources, the actual filings, the full streams, the original transcripts, and I bring the receipts. No hype. No performative AI slop. Just real stories from someone who’s actually building, actually coaching, and actually paying attention while doing things for my community and ultimately — my family.
Who this is for
Gen-X developers who remember how this all worked. Younger developers who want the history nobody's writing down. Parents trying to figure out whether their kid should learn to code in the age of AI. And anyone who's tired of being told what to think by people who didn't bother to look it up.
Why subscribe
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