Field Notes
Practical observations from the places where disciplines overlap — in blog format.
- Frederick Brooks told you this would happen. In 1971.Brooks figured out in 1971 why throwing more resources at a problem makes it worse. Companies are running into the exact same wall with AI agents today — and the fix is the same one it's always been.
- I wrote the filing system for AI agents in 2005. I just called it a website.If you're figuring out how your AI agents should be organized, you're solving a structure problem. I built a version of this in 2005. It was called a website.
- Drone footage that tells the story: what I shoot, who for, and why it sellsThe audiences I shoot for and the storytelling choices that make aerial footage worth putting in your client video.
- Safe archival compression: reclaim space, keep the rawHow to get storage back from a huge video archive without ever risking the originals you cannot reshoot.
- The golden record: indexing and fingerprinting 25 years of data, clients and videoOne authoritative, searchable record of everything: hashes to prove it, metadata and AI tags to find it, relationships to make sense of it.
- Infrastructure automation: getting the most out of the hardware you already haveMeasure before you buy. Find the real bottleneck, fix in the right order, then automate the checks.
- Managing networks and deploying change faster and saferMost outages come from changes without a way back. How to make network change boring, and where AI helps without being in charge.
- Free Range 2.0: the little girl grew upAn update to the free-range post: what it looks like when the kid is riding hunter/jumpers and the parents are holding the gate.
- Selling styles: art or science (a love story)Two reps, the same leads, 18 percent versus 8. What it takes to turn one person’s skill into a team’s process.
- Have you unoptimized your marketing campaigns yet?Constant optimization can filter out good opportunities. A simple exercise to reopen past decisions without risking your budget.
- You are missing critical lead informationShort forms convert best, but stopping at name, email and phone leaves a lot of value on the table. Here is how to collect more without asking more.
- Video: humor with sales motivationWhen the quarter drags, a good sales parody does more than another pep talk. One I keep sending.
- Irish sayings, blessings and toasts for St. Patrick’s DayA short list of Irish blessings, proverbs and toasts that have lasted because they are true.
- Ten excuses for not using the business metrics you already haveAre you being productive, or just very busy? Ten common excuses for ignoring the numbers, and what to do instead.
- Free range kids: the right way, the wrong way, and the Cody wayGrowing up around farms, job sites and a fire station taught me that experience teaches limits better than rules do. Here is the Cody way.