Joshua Schairbaum

Louisiana is a one-party state. Gerrymandered maps. Voter purges. Polling place closures. The people most hurt by the system are the ones most blocked from changing it. This is Jim Crow. Updated. Still running. The design hasn’t changed since 1890. Only the tools. Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Anti-vaccine bills. A resolution supporting the elimination of the Department of Education. Prison population up 2,000. Parole abolished. $1.3 billion for incarceration — from the same budget that funds schools. An immigration detention camp at Angola. Cancer Alley: cancer risk eleven times higher than government estimates. Trump’s EPA gutted the one rule that would have cut that risk by 96 percent. Landry called climate change a hoax and put a fossil fuel executive in charge of energy policy. Natural gas reclassified as “green energy” using a Koch-funded template. A $2.4 billion toll bridge was handed to a private company for fifty years. Cassidy — a doctor — calling it “reasonable” to cut 158,000 people off Medicaid when 69 percent of them already work. Dr. Isolde Butler at CrescentCare in New Orleans sees what happens next. Patients lose coverage, skip their blood pressure pills, and wind up in the emergency room with heart problems that didn’t have to happen. We pay for it anyway, just in the worst possible way. More prisons. Fewer schools. Poisoned air. Sold-off infrastructure. That’s the one-party state. And then there’s the corruption. Follow the money, and it leads right back here. People Who Think, a Republican ad firm in Louisiana, got $77 million in no-bid DHS contracts for Kristi Noem’s $220 million vanity ad campaign — the one where she sits on a horse at Mount Rushmore telling immigrants to leave. The firm’s head worked on Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial campaign with Noem’s chief advisor. The contracts bypassed competitive bidding by invoking a “national emergency.” Even Republican Senator John Kennedy called it out — and then, as usual, did nothing about it. That’s how it works. They name the corruption. They participate in it. Same party. Same money. Same silence when it counts. GEO Group — the largest private prison operator in America — reported a 700 percent profit increase last year. $254 million. Record-breaking. Their CEO called it “the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company’s history.” In Louisiana, seven of nine ICE detention facilities are former state prisons and jails, repurposed to hold immigrants. Detainees work for a dollar a day. GEO charges them $11 for a tube of toothpaste. A federal judge found the company had enjoyed “unjust enrichment” through illegal labor exploitation. The Big Beautiful Bill gave ICE $45 billion to expand detention. Private prison companies donated over a million dollars to Trump and Republican campaigns. They got billions back. That’s the transaction. That’s the one-party state at the federal level, flowing directly into Louisiana.

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I love Rails. I've built my wealth on it. That's exactly why I think we need to have an honest conversation about its biggest blind spot. Eileen M. U. gave a brilliant talk at Rails World last year: "The Myth of the Modular Monolith." After 6 years of modularizing Shopify's monolith, she concluded: "You can't solve human and cultural problems by changing your architecture." She's right kinda of about the culture part. But stopped one step short. Rails doesn't just allow tight coupling. It incentivizes it. ActiveRecord makes every model globally accessible from anywhere. Any controller, any model, any job can reach into any table through any association chain. There's no boundary enforcement. No import restriction. No compilation step that says "this module shouldn't know about that one." When your framework makes coupling the path of least resistance, blaming developers for coupled code is like blaming water for flowing downhill. Shopify tried to fix this with Packwerk. It just give you a map not a real solution. Rails Engines? Been there, done that. They are miniature apps that provide functionality to their host applications. They don't enforce real isolation and they weren't designed for progressive extraction. But this isn't a Rails problem. It's a missing tool problem. Look at what Nx did for the Node/TypeScript ecosystem: → Module boundaries enforced at the import level, not via YAML to-do lists → Dependency graph visualization built in → Affected-only CI: only test what actually changed → Clear public API per module, everything else is private by default → A real path from monorepo module to extracted service Nx didn't replace Node. It gave Node developers the guardrails to build modular systems naturally. The right thing became the easy thing. By default. Rails deserves the same. Imagine a Rails-native tool that: • Enforces module boundaries through autoload paths, not opt-in linting • Gives each module a public API (explicit exports) while keeping internals private • Generates a live dependency graph from actual code usage, not manual YAML declarations • Runs affected-only CI based on that graph Not a replacement for Rails. A companion that makes Rails' conventions work at scale. Eileen is right: culture matters. Education matters. Leadership incentives matter. But culture alone didn't give us CI/CD. Tools did. Culture alone didn't give us code formatting standards. Linters did. Culture alone won't give us modular Rails applications. Rails gave us developer happiness for building products. Now we need the same philosophy applied to building organizations of code. The myth isn't the modular monolith. The myth is that we have the right tools for one. Who's building this? 🎥 Eileen Uchitelle — "The Myth of the Modular Monolith" (Rails World 2024) https://lnkd.in/dabvzHQm

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Why neutrality in #SoftFurnishings is harder than boldness (And why I’ll always choose it.) 1️⃣ Neutral isn’t minimal. People often confuse neutral palettes with playing safe. But designing a neutral space that feels complete takes far more restraint than going bold. It’s easy to fill a room with colours and patterns. Much harder to know when to stop. 2️⃣ It takes discipline to edit. When clients see an empty corner, their first instinct is: “Let’s add something.” My job is to pause, feel the energy, and ask, “Does the space need more? Or are we avoiding stillness?” #HealingSpaces often breathe through the things we remove. 3️⃣ Quiet choices hold deeper power. A soft textured rug or a muted sheer aren’t background details. They are anchors. They guide the way you feel, move, and think. 4️⃣ Neutrality requires deep listening. Not just to the client, but also to the space. The walls. The light. The emotional weight of what already exists. If you listen carefully, you’ll often realise: The space always says something. You just need to honour it. 5️⃣ Bold is easy, but balance is tricky. Using statement colours is easy.  It takes a calibrated mind to design a space that feels peaceful and subtle. That is what makes neutral spaces feel timeless. Not boring, but deeply human. 💬 Have you ever walked into a room and felt instantly calm, without knowing why? *********** 🏡 Follow Darsha Manek for more on Soft Furnishings. *********** #LuxuryDesign #Entrepreneurship #EnergeticAlignment #Fabrics #Trends #HealingSpaces #SoftFurnishing

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I like designing systems that assume five people are maintaining them. If something only works with a large ops team, constant handoffs, or deep institutional knowledge, it’s fragile by default. It might function today, but it won’t age well. Small teams don’t get redundancy. The same people build, ship, debug, support, and iterate. That reality should shape the systems they rely on. The best systems I’ve seen at small studios share a few traits: They fail in obvious ways. They scale quietly instead of demanding attention. They explain themselves through use, not documentation. When something breaks, you can reason about it quickly. When traffic spikes, it degrades predictably. When a new teammate joins, they can understand what’s happening by watching the system run. Complexity isn’t free. Every hidden dependency becomes a future tax. Every manual process becomes a single point of stress. Designing for a small team forces better discipline. It pushes clarity. It rewards boring, durable choices over clever ones that require constant care. If a system works with five people, it usually still works with fifty. The reverse is rarely true. That constraint ends up being an advantage more often than people expect.

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Most teams don’t have a delivery problem. They have a portfolio visibility problem. Your execs ask: “Where are we on the strategic initiatives?” “Why are 12 projects red?” “What did we actually commit to this quarter?” “Why didn’t we see this risk coming?” And suddenly everyone is scrambling through: ❌ 47 Jira boards ❌ 12 spreadsheets ❌ 3 disconnected roadmaps ❌ Slides built at midnight Jira works beautifully at the team level. But when you try to use it for portfolio project management without the right structure? It becomes noise. Initiatives don’t roll up correctly. Roadmaps aren’t trusted. Dependencies are invisible. Capacity is guesswork. Leadership loses confidence in the data. And here’s the hard truth: Most Jira admins and PMs were never actually taught how to design Jira for portfolio-level thinking. They were taught tickets. Not strategy alignment. Not funding models. Not cross-program visibility. Not executive reporting architecture. That’s exactly why I’m hosting a 1-Day Portfolio Project Management Workshop right before Team ’26. This is not: 🚫 “Here’s how to create an Epic” 🚫 “Here’s what a board does” This is: ✔ How to architect hierarchy for strategic initiatives ✔ How to structure Advanced Roadmaps for true portfolio visibility ✔ How to manage cross-team dependencies without chaos ✔ How to track planned vs. unplanned work at scale ✔ How to design executive-ready dashboards people actually trust ✔ How to govern portfolio data so it doesn’t decay in 3 months If you’re: • A Jira Admin being pulled into portfolio conversations • A PM expected to report at the initiative level • A Portfolio Lead struggling with visibility • A Leader tired of “slide engineering” every quarter This workshop will change how you think about Jira. Before Team ’26. One full day. Deep dive. Practical architecture. No fluff. If you want Jira to move from “task tracker” to “strategic system of record”, sign up for our conference -> https://lnkd.in/gK8FGx96 Let’s build systems executives can actually trust.

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Ok. For the last, like, 15 years, I've constantly been told that CRDTs (and Yjs in particular) solve collaborative text editing. Both the offline and live-collab cases. After an excruciatingly painful evaluation, I'm prepared to argue not only is this completely false, they're generally not appropriate for production-grade editors... at all. Yeah, I know: everyone uses Yjs, so the problem must be us. Right? That's what I thought too. Well, did you know that on every single collaborative keystroke, Yjs will REPLACE YOUR ENTIRE DOCUMENT? (See this GitHub issue: https://lnkd.in/gEkPCEEE ) Did you know that this is BY DESIGN? (See this discussion on the ProseMirror boards: https://lnkd.in/gAwnWQ9N ) Did you know that this breaks, like, every editor plugin? (See the ProseMirror author's commentary here: https://lnkd.in/gG_U8n5u ) I am not trying to bag on anyone, but to me this kind of mistake belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what text editors need to perform well, in any situation, let alone a collaborative one. Anyway, learn from my pain. I wrote a somewhat long-form article about all the other challenges we ran into with CRDTs here: https://lnkd.in/gVJHnDKZ

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The Era of Personal Software Something shifted this week and I think it is worth naming out loud. We are entering the era of personal software. Not software built by companies for millions of users. Software built by individuals, for themselves, for their specific problems, their specific workflows, their specific way of thinking. The tools have crossed a threshold where this is not a novelty anymore. It is just how things work now. And quietly, almost without anyone making a big announcement about it, hyper personalization is becoming real. Not the marketing version of personalization where your name shows up in an email subject line. The real version. Where the software you use every day is shaped exactly around how your mind works because you built it that way. That is a massive shift and most people have not fully processed what it means yet. When AI Goes Wrong Here is the honest part though. As long as AI is working, everything feels like magic. You are moving fast, shipping things, solving problems in minutes that used to take days. It feels like a superpower. But when it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. Not a little wrong. Not "oh I need to tweak this" wrong. The kind of wrong where you are three hours deep into a debugging spiral, burning through credits, watching the AI confidently make the same mistake over and over again with slight variations. The kind of wrong where you realize you have spent more time fixing what the AI broke than it would have taken to build the thing from scratch. That is the reality right now. The highs are incredible. The lows eat your time, your credits, and your patience. The Net Positive is Mind Blowing But here is the thing I keep coming back to. Even with the glitches. Even with the debugging spirals. Even with the moments where you want to close the laptop and walk away. The net positive is absolutely mind blowing. What I shipped this week would have taken me weeks a year ago. Maybe longer. The fact that I can hit a wall, lose an hour to a weird bug, and still end the day having built more than I thought possible is the whole story of this moment. The glitches are real. The frustration is real. But they are worth it. Not in some abstract "it will get better eventually" way. Worth it right now, today, this week. The balance is not even close. If you are on the fence about building with AI, stop waiting. Yes, you will hit walls. Yes, some of those walls will feel ridiculous. But the things you will build between those walls will surprise you in the best way possible. Checkout the Weekly Roundup: https://lnkd.in/gwP3Wq8H #ai #builder

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The "Information Tax" is a silent killer of agency growth. Most founders think they have a people problem. They don’t. They have a Retrieval Problem. When your institutional knowledge is buried in nested Google Drive folders, month-old Slack threads, and forgotten Notion pages, you aren't a CEO—you’re a Human Search Engine. Every time your team has to ask you "Where is the X file?" or "What’s the process for Y?", you pay a tax in focus and momentum. Today’s Build (The Demo): This video shows the logic layer we’ve architected for Agency OS. * The Input: We’ve indexed unstructured data across the entire agency workspace. The Process: Using a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline, the system "reads" your specific history and documentation. The Result: Sourced, precise answers in seconds. No guessing. No digging. No "Founder Bottleneck." The Goal: We aren't building this just to be "technical." We're building it to buy back the White Space on your calendar. When the team can query the system instead of the Architect, the Architect can finally get back to the strategy. It’s time to move from "Founder-led operations" to Systems-led Autonomy. The Systems Scan: I’m opening up 2 spots this week for a Technical Systems Audit. We’ll map your data silos and identify exactly where your "Information Tax" is leaking revenue. 👇 Comment "SCAN" below and I’ll send over the framework we use to audit these silos.

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