The person behind the notes

I’ve spent a long time
inside the work.

I write about the decisions, tests, and hard edges that determine whether technology works beyond the demo.

Portrait of Eric MacDougall
ERIC MACDOUGALL / IN THE WORK
A short version of the road

Engineering first.
Curiosity always.

I’ve worked in technology for more than twenty years. I founded and later exited a software development and marketing agency. I’ve since worked as a lead developer, VP of Engineering, and CTO at larger organizations and startups. Today I’m also a co-founder of FrameBright.

Those roles put me close to code, teams, business decisions, and the consequences after a system leaves the whiteboard. My work has crossed SaaS, AI, distributed systems, blockchain, and a range of client industries. The specifics of each role matter less here than the habit they built: ask what can actually be observed, what can fail, and who owns the decision when it does.

That is why this is a journal. I want room for a position, the example that made me hold it, the sources behind it, and the experiment that might change my mind. Some notes are about agent harnesses and testing. Others are about compute infrastructure, industrial automation, or how teams hire and operate when AI changes the pace of implementation.

I’m publishing shorter platform-specific arguments on X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube, then collecting the longer sourced version here when its release conditions are met.

Background facts above are drawn from Eric’s existing public homepage. Portrait supplied by Eric for this journal and used without altering the source photo.