The thing I can’t emphasize enough about living through the “flooding the zone” era is the exhaustion. It is a cumulative weight creeping in through social media and offhanded, unguarded moments during work. If you are any kind of empathetic person, it threatens to crush your resolve. Things only seem to be getting worse, the weight heavier, and the callousness more justified. You can’t stop caring, not entirely. But becoming guarded becomes a survival tactic for getting out of bed. C...| Matthew Reinbold
TL;DR - The problem isn’t coding with GenAI. The problem is what coding with GenAI lets us get away with. It allows us to delay making real choices, real trade-offs, and real systemic changes by giving the illusion of movement and acceleration. In a moment where maintenance, curation, and simplification are the actual leverage points, we’re rewarding copycat output. Not because software developers are stupid or short-cited, but because our incentives, our markets, and our social platforms...| Matthew Reinbold
Image Credit: Reinbold, Ollie. Untitled sketch. 2025, pencils. The word “community” comes up a lot in my software consulting work. There are open-source communities. Developer communities. Platform communities. Increasingly, companies expect their employees to form Communities of Practice to solve their cross-silo dysfunction. You’ll find “community” on strategy decks, in job titles, and embedded in marketing copy. But when I work with software leaders on what that actually means an...| Matthew Reinbold
Life before electrification isn’t some dorm room hypothetical about the good old days of kerosene and character. It’s something my grandfather actually lived through. He spoke glowingly about the Rural Electrification Administration. In the 1930s and 40s, the REA brought power for production, radios for news, and watts for refrigeration and heat to rural South Dakota. In other words, REA lit this corner of the world. Fast forward several decades, and I was a kid growing up on that same pa...| Matthew Reinbold
The “Ironies of Automation” Paper Defines a Paradox of Automation Ruth Malan, a software architecture and systems consultant, organizes the wonderful “Papers in Systems” discussion series (I’ve also taken her Organizational Design Masterclass). During those virtual Zoom sessions, facilitators present a noteworthy paper, and the assembled group share their thoughts on the piece. It can be an eye-opening experience, if for no other reason than to realize that annoying boogeyman you th...| Matthew Reinbold
There are real problems that could be addressed by new legislation. Along with ubiquitous cell phone cameras and deep fake abilities have come a rash of gross online behavior; what we might have once referred to as revenge porn is now collectively referred to as non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). The U.S. Senate recently passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act to address the problem. The intention is good. However, the proposed implmentation leaves much to be desired - so much so that Trump excitedl...| Matthew Reinbold
I have several tepid attempts at lending some clarifying thought to (gestures manically) this moment. The problem, however, is that anything I have to say feels so incredibly ineffective at stopping this slow-motion trainwreck. Instead of letting a pile of half-completed work make me feel inept, I decided to switch tracks to something more approachable: contributing to an old-fashioned blog carnival. I initially saw Ethan Marcotte and Jon Hicks do their versions and was then reminded about wh...| Matthew Reinbold
As the current congressional session begins to wind down, the PRESS ACT, which was passed unanimously by the House, is still waiting for a vote. As described by Zack Whittiker writing on TechCrunch: The PRESS Act, if passed into law, would enshrine nationwide protections for journalists across the United States from being forced to identify or give up their confidential sources (except in emergency cases, like to prevent an act of terrorism). The bill also grants other protections, such as li...| Matthew Reinbold
Growing up on a farm, I learned just how stressful harvest time is at an early age. There is a very narrow window during which it is possible to maximize your returns. Go too early, and you risk spoilage. Wait until too late, and you end up leaving money in the field. And that all depends on whether the weather holds. Mistime any of those things, and you have to wait until next spring (and another six-figure seed bill) for another chance to make things right. Despite all that, I can recall mu...| Matthew Reinbold
This Matthew Reinbold| matthewreinbold.com
This Matthew Reinbold| matthewreinbold.com