Software & business
Turning real operations — factory floors, painting crews, radar rooms — into software an industry actually runs on. Case studies and patterns from twenty years of shipping products under real constraints.
The management-system essay is the pattern itself: rotomolding plants, painting contractors, and AI dev teams converge on the same shape of software once you walk the floor before you design anything, because the operation tells you what it needs faster than a requirements document does. The first-job essay is the origin of that instinct: a 2007 space console operator, tired of five beeping timers, writes a fix that works, that the brass likes, and that never gets adopted, which is its own lesson about the gap between working software and software people use. Both are about what it takes for a system to earn a place in how an industry runs, not how it is supposed to run on paper.
The posts
- July 30, 2026
The first job I ever automated was my own
In 2007 a space console operator, tired of five beeping timers, wrote a C# app for satellite passes. It never got adopted. What that taught Joseph Dattilo.
- July 10, 2026
The management system an industry standardizes on
Rotomolding, painting contractors, and AI dev teams: walking the floor first produces the software a whole industry ends up running on, by Joseph Dattilo.