Every vendor call, every incident review, every architecture discussion where someone asked “wait, how does that actually work?” and I found myself reaching for a metaphor instead of a diagram. Those moments kept piling up.
I’d be on the phone with an engineering lead explaining why their API gateway wasn’t actually gatekeeping anything. Or sitting across from a friend at a coffee shop, comparing session tokens to wristbands at a concert. And afterward, something about the conversation would stick. Not the technical details. Those I could look up. The part that stuck was the moment it clicked for the other person. The bridge that worked.
So I’d open my notes app and scribble it down. A sentence, sometimes two. An analogy that landed. A question someone asked that reframed something I thought I already understood. I did this for years without thinking much about it.
Then one day I scrolled back through all of it.
There was a lot more there than I expected. Hundreds of fragments. Some were half thoughts that didn’t go anywhere. But others were surprisingly complete. Little explanations I’d refined over dozens of conversations without realizing I was refining them. The same concepts, sharpened by repetition, each time getting a little closer to the version that actually made someone’s eyes light up.
So I’m going to start sharing them. Not in any particular order. Just the ones that keep coming up.
Some are about the fundamentals that trip everyone up, the things every application depends on and almost nobody can explain without waving their hands. Some are about the invisible infrastructure that holds everything together until it doesn’t. And some are about bigger questions that don’t have clean answers yet.
Each one starts with a conversation, an analogy, or a question that somebody actually asked. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting and wished someone would just explain the thing in plain language, this is probably for you.
That wristband analogy I mentioned? That’s the first one.