Whose job is it to make the board understand the technology?
In deep tech, many strategic decisions are also technical ones - and a board needs someone close enough to the technology to translate it.
Writing
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15 pieces on software, physical products and the systems between them. Newest first.
Latest
When 80 amps wasn't really 80 amps
A lithium battery bank, two burned-out alternators and three seasons around Scandinavia - and the difference between what a component can deliver and what it can sustain.
I've built things from some strange places. One of them was a pigsty.
A software company in central Copenhagen, a garage on Frederiksberg, an old pigsty and a sailboat - and why companies only look inevitable in hindsight.
On my boat, every watt is visible. On my laptop, almost none of them are.
A battery monitor on a sailboat, an AI agent in the cloud - and why the weight of computing never went away. It just got harder to see.
Archive
- Finishing is a skill No delivery, no invoice - what consulting taught me about finishing, and why the compromises belong in scope, not standards.
- Every time the tools get better, someone worries that the next generation won't really understand the work From view source to a mainframe that only spoke in whole numbers to agents - the blood doesn't disappear when the abstraction level rises. It just moves.
- 73%. It looks like a measurement. It isn't. There is no sensor inside a battery measuring 73% - a December 2009 lesson in state of charge, drift, and models that get more confident than reality justifies.
- AI writes most of my code now. The architecture is still mine. After 30 years of building software, the job has changed shape. AI made day 1 dramatically cheaper. Day 500 still costs what it always did.
- A few weeks ago, I drove to Germany to pick up a diesel engine Eighteen years of electrification - and why my own sailboat got a used, proven diesel. A story about system boundaries.
- We built a system for a crisis that never came A crisis management system that never activated - and why so much good engineering succeeds by looking like waste.
- Choose the wrong word in a software project, and you may live with its meaning for years Locked or disabled? Why agreeing on what the central words mean looks like administration - and is actually architecture.
- It looked brilliant on the whiteboard A dynamic document structure inside a SQL database - an elegant design that met time, and lost. Where 'day 500' was born.
- The toughest stakeholder I ever had wasn't a person Building pharmaceutical software under FDA 21 CFR Part 11 - and what the industry's hardest constraint taught me.
- Sometimes the best product still loses Eldyt.dk, 2008-2014: electric city cars financed by advertising - and a business case standing on ground we didn't own.
- The most valuable thing I built was never the hardware An electric car at COP15, electric propulsion at sea years later - and the realisation of what actually carried over.